OK... so.....

Normally, I will record the lead vox and then 2 duplicates get recorded and panned left and right. Then, if I have harmony I record the harmony tracks and do the same thing.

This time I did something totally different.

I recorded just one track. The lead vocal. I cloned the tracks in my DAW and panned them hard left and hard right. I nudged one of them one click right and the other 2 clicks right.

I ran melodyne (MDE) on the lead vocal manually "fixing" the imperfections and off note stuff.

I rendered that to hard copy and ran MDE on each of the cloned tracks capturing only the chorus parts and the tags. I shifted one track up a few steps and the other down a few steps leaving the rest of the track unaltered and unfixed. In the chorus, since you can't just shift up or down and have everything be correct musically, I edited a few notes to make the harmony sound good. I dropped the levels to -17db or so and let it roll.

The band had it's own buss and EQ, the vox had the same setup, and the guitars were in their own buss as well with a loudness limiter from Cakewalk..... the infamous Boost11 plug. I have been known to use that on vocals as well but generally when I find I have to use B11 on vox, it's time to reexamine the mix and start over.

Overall, the vox eq is a little rounded off for my personal taste, but it seems to work well, so I left it where it was.

Regarding the vocals..... and cloning them.... Not saying at all that one way is right or the other wrong, but many folks do kinda look at the way this vocal mix was done as the way "not to do it". However, it seems to work well and I didn't notice any overtly ill effects..... comb filtering and the like.... so it might be something I look at in the future. I did notice some artifacts that gave a distortion kind of sound in there but the guitars tended to cover it fairly well. I don't know how well this would work on a song where the vocals were up front and center though. I will be playing around with this a bit from time to time. So, I will keep you posted.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
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