Big gang/crowd vocals

[TruestPain]

between 8 to 12 people divided into male and female depending on what kind of sound you're trying to get... In the most open room possible that would fit everyone comfortably without bring a harsh ambient sound along with the vocals.


I was actually planning on doing this myself for the first time and was seeking out a gym or an auditorium of some sort to where I could use the space and the natural sound behind. Haven't quite decided or figured out how I would like to execute it.


I've seen it done before.... and its not that difficult to have accomplised. I would say that the mixing part is probably the hardest... you'll be dealing with multiple hi and lows, mids... ect ect

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Bill@Avid

I don’t know if this is helpful or what you’re looking for but this was my tried and true big hair big chorus formula circa 1986.

I’d collect up all of the guys in the band that could sing (three if I was lucky maybe four). More than a few people and it would get pretty loose and unintelligible.

I’d position them standing arm’s length from either side of a c414 in figure 8. (+1 on the distance makes a crowd). I had a pretty vanilla room, not too live not too dead, and arm’s length provided just enough room sound.

I’d get one take that sounded good and tight and then do three more playing only the original take for reference to keep things tight. When I had four tight takes this was usually enough to get a big polished sound. A little HPF EQ and some sucking out the boxy mids is it was pretty straight forward gang vocal.

Here’s where it gets stupid. If I was going for that huge “noise reduction out sound” I’d repeat the steps above and ask the guys to pretend to be someone else. I’d take looser and pitcher takes as well. Usually this set would get mashed with compression and eviscerated with EQ so that all you got was the presence and sibilance. You could EQ the pitch out of them so the just added the suggestion bad singing and some extra mass. I would blend this second set with the polished set to make them a little uglier.

On rare occasions if the song called for that extra push over the cliff I’d mult them as a group, cut all the lows and mids, and then excite or distort just the high frequencies then bring this up in parallel behind the original. Sometimes I’d noise gate them really tightly and get them to snap in and out of existence. In reflection I think we were trying to emulate (no pun intended) sounds of background vocals that we being triggered by live acts using the 8 and 12 bit samplers of the day.

Good times! That was cathartic, sorry for the novella

Nice

Novela but nice none the less

[mblanton66]

Odd trick I learned by mistake which gives that large, muddy congregational response type sound: Next time you've got your guys around a condenser mike doing their group thing, somewhere else in the room also track with another mic getting reflected sound off something hard (in my case it was 2" from a large cymbal). Mix that in with the other takes.
And make sure they know you MEANT to do that.

[jryser]

We inadvertently got an absolutely killer room sound when somebody left their headphones turned up next to one of the overhead mics. Yeah, we meant to do that!


Sent from my Pro Tools beating heart.

[Craig F]

got to love the happy accidents

[TruestPain]

Happy accidents can definitely bring happy results.


that should be a seperate post.... I'm sure the lot of us here have made mistakes where we probably thought "[bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep], now this has to all get completely re-done."

When in-fact, it actually all works out.

[Kristo Kotkas]

There are so many comp/eq/VI plugins out there but so few creative ones. Would love to see a *multiplier* plugin from someone. For gang vocals or anything else that needs to be multiplied... like a cowbell

[led5150]

Here's a piece of gear I use all the time for crowds which doesn't involve lots of takes or lots of people.

It's actually a live guitar/vocal FX pedal for live performances, but works great for creating realistic sounding crowds, if tucked behind 4 or so real voices.

It's the TC Helicon Voicelive2. Its mono in stereo out, so you'll have to route a track from PT to an out of your choice and send it to the TC unit.

Generally, I'll have the singer do 4 passes of whatever the crowd section is. Maybe an octave underneath and any harmonies and then run each of these tracks through the TC using one of my 2 favorite settings "Arena Chant" or "The Masses" and voila! Giant crowd! Of course, you'll have to high pass these tracks, and generally I'll dip out a nice chunk around 2.5K to get the "machine" sound out, but with a little tweaking and tucking it can sound pretty natural. Or not, which is also really cool.

The way the TC works is basically changes the formant, pitch, and timing of the vocal and splits it into up to 4 voices. Each of the 4 voices pitch, formant, detune, pan etc are customizable in the menu (took a minute to get the hang of it, but it's pretty straight forward when you get used to the interface) but a lot of the time the default settings sound pretty cool! It will default with reverb and delay, but you can switch these off with the corresponding buttons.

And there you go, 20 "voices" (including the original) for only recording 4 tracks.

Another cool plugin for this if you're not willing/able to drop the $700 bucks for the TC is Quick Quack's "VST Chamber". I like this too and sometimes I'll use a combination of the TC and the plugin to get crazy crowds. Also, a track through the TC and then into the plug has some really insane results, not recommended for the meek of heart.

[Kris75]

Get as many people as possible that have the ability to sing. Put up an Omni mic in the middle of them. Get them to be far away from the mic.

When I do this, I will usually take over a restaurant or pub. A place that reminds people of crowd noise.

Then I will play back the song through speakers and have the crowd sing along. I will then get everyone to stay in the same spot and record a pass of just the playback.

After everyone has sung (I usually will do 6-8 passes) I duplicate the noise track to match the number of takes I did of the gang vocals and invert the phase of them and pan them appropriately to remove the playback track from the vocal tracks.

If you listen to the end of "War and Fire" from this link you will hear the results.

https://www.facebook.com/taylorandth...p_178091127385


Great results!!

[khaudio]

Originally Posted by Kristo Kotkas

There are so many comp/eq/VI plugins out there but so few creative ones. Would love to see a *multiplier* plugin from someone. For gang vocals or anything else that needs to be multiplied... like a cowbell

You can use granular synthesis to do this. Make the grain envelope long enough to hold an actual sample, with a subtle shift in pitch/timing of each grain.

I've used this technique to "multiply" rain in kyma.

For vocals, it would be tricky, particularly in the timing- the grains would have to be extremely long to capture an entire line, and a cloud of short grains may sound more like reverb. However, live pitch shifting and time smearing of some other sort would likely do the trick.

This is all, of course, after recording all that can be used.

Also, Bill@Avid, thanks for posting those tips! Very helpful.