Best way to make a single track acoustic guitar double?

[Fourtsian]

Hello,

I know it's just best to double track at first, but being a professional, sometimes there is situation that makes you impossible to suggest.

So, what would you do if you want the double kind of effect if you only have a single guitar track? Any cool trick?

[albee1952]

Several options are available. You can duplicate the track and shift the duplicate later by 1200-1600 samples. You can use EQ to tweak each track(original and duplicate) to have very different tone. You could even pitch shift one by a few cents plus or minus, and/or use Elastic Audio(in Polyphonic) to create small timing changes. You could even re-amp the original track(play it thru a speaker with a mic in front of it and record to another track). None of this will fool anyone into thinking it was played twice, but its not too out front in the mix, you can get the "flavor" of double tracking.

[youngas75]

There's also a couple of plug ins which will do it for you. I have Waves Doubler. Never tried it on guitar but used it on vocals a bit and had the effect low in the mix.

[DrFord]

I would just pan it hard left, then send out a prefader 0.0 send to a short delay panned hard right Zero feedback. Set it somewhere around 30ms - 150ms. Use your ear. You will notice it starts out sounding just big, then as you pull back the delay it will start to widen. Pull back too far and it will just sound like a slap back delay.

This is pretty much the first step in every "stereo enhancing" plugin.

work the delay!

Doc

[antonis]

Antares AVOX DUO is out there but you can easily get away with the tips mentioned here.

[Guy Staley]

One trick I use is to copy and paste from different parts of the song: i.e. - copy verse 2 over verse 1 and verse 1 over verse 2. Chorus 1 over chorus 2, chorus 2 over chorus 1, etc. Or, if the part is repetitive, you can copy the 2nd 4 bars of the verse over the 1st 4 bars of the verse, etc. If there are some parts that never actually get played twice in the song, you can usually drop in a time shifted copy here and there to fill out the part, and as long as it's a short section, and the tracks are not mixed too forward, it will create the illusion of a complete doubled part.

Of course this only works if the parts were recorded to click track, and the tempo is the same in the different parts of the song.

This technique works great for backing vocals too! Especially if you use Vocalign to eradicate gross timing differences.