How do i make pro-quality harmonies??

[Rayvenx2208]

hey everybody, im very curious about how you guys record and mix harmonies.

the way ive always done it was to just have the artist record track by track, lows to highs. ive also heard of ppl recording just one track, and the engineer being able to produce a choir of harmonies with just one voice.

what do they do to get such crisp, tight harmonies off of one track of vocals? is there some sort of plugin that makes creating harmonies fast and easy, and natural sounding?

Think "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse, or "single ladies" by beyonce.

thx for all your input. i just wanna make some dope sounding harmonies

[jdutaillis]

As far as I know (which isn't that far) the "pros" actually record the harmonies. I'm fairly sure that Matt Belamy (singer from Muse) would be doing them all himself, maybe with the other guys in the band helping out, as they all sing live and on the records.

However, there are harmony plugins you can get. Antares (makers of autotune) also make a "harmony engine" plugin. I don't have alot of experience with this plugin but I do know it is out there.

As far as making some dope sounding harmonies, get urself some bad ass singers with some wicked good pipes on em!

[se.audio]

The best way is definitely to record the different harmonies, but there are a couple of ways you can fatten up your vocals with just one track:
Send to an aux track with a AIR chorus and AIR enhancer
Send to an aux track with Antares harmony engine
Send to an aux track with Antares Choir
Use melodyne or other pitch shifting device to process different versions of the original, maybe delay them a little to get bigger results...

[albee1952]

Here's some more advice. To get things really tight, you can use Vocalign or Elastic Audio(manual but as effective). The trick there is to move/stretch/align all the BGV audio so it follows the lead vocal perfectly(as many humans aren't that tight with their singing). Doubling each part helps as well. I prefer to really sing each part twice, but you can double by using AUX sends and sending each part to a second track with AutoTune on it(so you have 1 raw part, AND the same part but tuned). I also like to put an EQ plugin on all BGV tracks and dip some around 350Hz so the BGV's don't get too full(and step all over the main vocal).

[Jay_dammit]

Hire a pro singer (and no, I'm not being facetious.)

I've been doing this music lark for over 30 years, and I've watched (and participated enthusiastically in) the technology revolution from the word go.

Technology can enhance a good performer, not replace them.

It has been my experience that in the time it takes to tweak and polish something using technology, I could have got better results with a human in half the time and twice the fun.

Sorry:-(

[raiderrob]

My band's singer sings all of our harmonies. On all of the harmony parts I bus them to the same compressor and reverb. I do not use individual compression and reverb on each channel. This allows for a different feel than the lead singer and it makes them all sound "together".

[barry1]

U can copy the vocals to a few tracks and use elastic pitch to raise where u want the harmony to be on one and then on the other lower..do a little editing on start times and volume and now u got a 3 part harmony!..i learned this from a you tube video a few months back...it does sound natural and not chipmonkey.

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by Rayvenx2208

hey everybody, im very curious about how you guys record and mix harmonies.

the way ive always done it was to just have the artist record track by track, lows to highs. ive also heard of ppl recording just one track, and the engineer being able to produce a choir of harmonies with just one voice.

what do they do to get such crisp, tight harmonies off of one track of vocals? is there some sort of plugin that makes creating harmonies fast and easy, and natural sounding?

Think "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse, or "single ladies" by beyonce.

thx for all your input. i just wanna make some dope sounding harmonies

I've worked with quite a few singers that record and tour with a lot of the big hiphop/R&B/pop artists. Rock bands are usually a different animal when it comes to doing background vocals.

For Hiphop R&B, the artist or main singer will sing the melody and possibly sing a couple of the background parts as well as most of the doubles and harmony parts in the verses (for example, like Beyonce). Then the producer usually brings in 2 to 6 other singers to do all the harmony parts. Sometimes for some pop singers, they just sing the melody and there are other singers that are brought in to do doubles and verse harmonies as well. This could be because the lead singer isn't good enough to do it, or because of time restrictions and/or scheduling conflicts.

For rock groups, it's usually the band singing background vocals and sometimes the lead singer will sing the doubles or another band member will sing doubles and harmonies. Also, sometimes other people get brought into the session as well. Sometimes the producer will sing harmonies and background (mutt lang is known for this) or sometimes they will bring in a session singer if the lead singer isn't good enough to harmonize with himself.

Very rarely on these "big budget" albums will they resort to using a plugin to create the harmonies. I'm sure it's happened once or twice, but those are the exceptions rather than the norm.

[O.G. Killa]

I should probably also point out why these big albums still choose to use real people instead of a plugin to do harmonies...

It ultimately boils down to money. Paying someone to sit in a studio to manipulate the lead vocal into all the required harmony parts for a song usually takes a considerable amount of time. Maybe 3 hours per song. If the album has 12 songs you are looking at 36 hours (almost a week) of editing. If you are paying a sound engineer $100/hr and the studio $250/hr, that is $12,600 to create harmony and bg vox parts for the entire album.

It's usually cheaper to have 2 singers come in and do all the additional vocals for the song. When I've worked with these singers, they can usually move through a song in about 15 to 20 minutes. So you are doing 3 to 4 songs an hour. So in 3 hours you can usually have ALL the additional vocals done for the whole album, with pitch and phrasing so accurate that it requires little to no editing afterward. So the singers are $250/hr, engineer is $100/hr, studio is $250/hr all for three hours... is a total of $2550 to record all the harmony and BG vox parts for the entire album. A SAVINGS of about $10,000 compared to editing!!!!

These are rates that artists like Beyonce are probably paying. For local artists, the rates are definitely much less, but the realistic savings are the same.

For people working in a home studio, then it isn't an issue. You can save money by doing it all yourself with a plugin at the expense of wasting 36 hours of your time. Which is no big deal if you are paying for the album yourself. But in the "professional" situations where everyone is getting paid for their time to work on a project, it makes more sense to just bring good singers in and knock it out in an afternoon.

[Jay_dammit]

LMAO @ O.G. Killa, that's wonderful... I remember when DAWs first appeared, producers were saying "It's cheaper to edit it than to hire musicians..." How fantastic that it's turned around...

I would rather pay a drummer and stick 4 mics on the kit than spend hours programming and editing; I would rather pay a backing singer than spend hours pitch-shifting and auto-tuning: if I wasn't a guitarist I would rather pay a guitarist than spend hours searching through sample CDs.

Here's what it comes down to for me: every musician who plays on a track adds their emotional energy, and harmonic and rythmic sense to the track. The end result is miles better MUSIC (remember that stuff?) because of that energy. Go listen to the classic rock albums: "Exiles on Main Street" contains technical errors that wouldn't pass the DAW test; "Cissy Strut" has at least one guitar part that is so out of time it would have not even been allowed in todays demo recordings, yet they are both classic recordings.

And no, it's not my generation's view either. I teach 18-year-olds who love those records. When I ask them why, they reply "It feels real, somehow."

IMNSHO......