how to mix doubled lead vocal

[entoine]

I am recording voices on rock songs and we are doubling the lead vocal on some parts of the songs.
I tried mixing it and I am not satified by the result in the sense we still ear two too distinct voices.
Is there a technique or advice to mix theses two tracks to achieve a better result?? :roll:

 

[Giles117 DP]

How tight is the singer (timing wise)

If he is loose with his timing and matching his previous vocal then you will have to edit the vocal time strecting, shrinking and nudging.

 

[klimt]

Yep. Its all about performance with this. You have to get your singer to sing as near as possible to the original.

You could run into phasing problems if it becomes too exact - but save yourself some bother and make the singer work for a living

 

[Eurocide]

Another fine trick is to delete & fade consonants of the doubled voice, because hard phonetics like \"t\", \"s\", \"p\" a.s.f. will produce the most problems in the perception of timing.
E.g.: If there are mainly vowels you won't get any annoying double-\"t\"s at the end of a line.
It's a bit time consuming work but worth the effort!

 

[Akis]

You could also time align the takes with a tool like Melodyne; that'll fix the consonant-related problems, too.

 

[rush909]

The only time I have really been able to achieve a \"pro\" doubled sound where it really sounds like 1 voice, but thicker is when I bit the bullet and bought an expensive mic chain... for some reason using a nice tube mic going into my UA6176 I can have the second voice only a couple dbs lower and it still does not sound \"doubled\".... it just seems easier to get it to sound right without as much work the better the chain is - things just stack better... but all the previous techniques are sometimes required for voc that have more presence/high-mids in them...

r.

 

[entoine]

thank you all guys..
I've worked on timing of the two tracks with some of editing and things are much better. I agree with you rush909, since I've got a good chain, nice mic and 6176 as preamp, things are much easier not only for doubled voices but also on a lot of sources.
I've tried different panning options, and the option of little panning left and right the two tracks gives interessant result too (with optimisation of timing), even if the doubling process becomes obvious to the ear... it depends on the song...

 

[Eric Dahlberg]

for some reason using a nice tube mic going into my UA6176 I can have the second voice only a couple dbs lower and it still does not sound "doubled".... it just seems easier to get it to sound right without as much work the better the chain is - things just stack better...

IME, compression is the key here. Hit each individual vocal take hard with the LA2A, that'll bring them together pretty effortlessly. Also, since I'm always trying to do things quick & dirty, I'll usually just taper off the consonants with the 1176 (LN or SE, either one will get the job done) set to the fastest attack on the second vocal rather than trying to time align everything (assuming the vocal takes were good in the first place).

 

[Holly]

I second Akis' suggestion to use Melodyne, but be careful not to overdo it because of phasing issues. Another great tool is SynchroArts Vocalign. But unfortunately it is available as a plugin only for Pro Tools. For all the others, there is a stand-alone version, but it isn't very comfortable to align outside your sequencer, imo.

Holly