That ELO (?) backround harmony vocal stacked sound (?)

Paul_Woodlock · February 21, 2011, 8:06pm

Steve Fogal:

Paul Woodlock:

Record each harmony 12 times and pan 6 left and 6 right. You want each pitch to be sightly off to create the chorus effect. If you record a take that’s too off delete it and re-record it.

Wow, and I thought my idea of only doubling each 3 part harmony, then panning L/R was a lot of tracks! One thing for sure is, the raw 3 part harmonies I’ve done sound weak, so multiples would make it stronger…especially on the falsetto notes.

I can do slightly off pitches no problemo!

Also… The reason I brought up asking little to no effect (reverb/delay) is because that sound is so tight and closed (best explanation I have) …maybe the sheer number of vocal tracks will act to compensate being that they won’t be in perfect unison…or maybe it’s all the compression giving that smooth tightness.

Yup sheer number of tracks gives the fat chorus effect. record with compression and add a bit on the group too

The good thing today is that in cubase you can easily edit the multi tracks to tighten up the consonants.

btw - I once read a thread, on gearslutz I think, between some guy and the Earth Wind and Fire engineer George Massenburg about how a certain vocal sound was achieve on one of EWFs albums. Guy was convinced it was effects. Massenburg tried hard to convince him it was just sung that way.

I used to record mass vocal harmony on 24 trk machines by copying a rough mix of the tune onto another 24 trk tape and using the other 22 tracks to build up huge overdubs of harmonies. then mix down and spin them back onto the main multi-track as a stem pair.