Thank you for listening Joanne.

I do all of the vocals on my recordings track by track. I enjoy the process of layering harmonies.

I used four and five tracks for harmony parts in this song depending on how many harmony voices above and below the melody track. Where I use five tracks, there are two below and three above. I prefer to set up a scratch mix of the instrument tracks to do vocals with.

I attempt to record the tracks as close to the same audio level and then tweak a dB here and there. I don’t care for using normalization on individual tracks, I prefer to tweak each track only where needed, but that’s just one of my quirks. When the harmony tracks sound balanced and blend well before any panning, I add compression, eq for a bit of brightness, and the amount of reverb that seems to work.

I put the harmony tracks to the left or right in the stereo field and separate each of them slightly so they are not on top of each other. I do this either listening to the tracks soloed without instruments or with only a guitar or piano. Then tighten up the entire mix and keep fingers crossed.

A technique I sometimes use for dramatic effect is to clone the harmony tracks in Cakewalk and put a set of five (or whatever the number) on the left and five on the right, varying the panning on each side. I also experiment with spreading harmony tracks across the stereo field.

I have zip, zero, expertise and experiment and use what seems to work.

I have a rather thin voice and I find it helps me to use the doubling technique of cloning vocal tracks. My higher register and lower register can be weak standing on their own. The same with falsetto. When I double tracks using cloning it strengthens that vocal in the mix.

So that’s the method of madness I use. Hope it helps.