HUGE backing vocals

[wylde342]

I'm using Cakewalk Sonar and we are pre recording some live use backing tracks for "Living On A Prayer" by Bon Jovi. I'm curious as to how to get those famous ridiculously big backing vocals like the song. We can all sing the parts, but I'm curious about effects/etc that would help create that "Sound."

Any ideas? All comments are appreciated and welcomed!

[paulneedles]

octuple-track the vocals, pan them around, assign to a sub, chuck in a short stereo delay, reverb to taste, eq severely(the octuple tracking will need a lot of fixing as it's 8 identical problems on top of one another) and compress a little(not too much, as it will make them small again), do this for all the harmony parts and bobs your uncle!

[d. gauss]

Originally Posted by wylde342

I'm curious as to how to get those famous ridiculously big backing vocals

use ridiculously big backing vocalists. aretha's got to be 200 lbs., that blues traveller dude is like mobile home sized, and the bowling for soup geetar player....

[Jazzy Alz]

Originally Posted by paulneedles

octuple-track the vocals, pan them around, assign to a sub, chuck in a short stereo delay, reverb to taste, eq severely(the octuple tracking will need a lot of fixing as it's 8 identical problems on top of one another) and compress a little(not too much, as it will make them small again), do this for all the harmony parts and bobs your uncle!

Sounds delicious..... what's for dinner tomorrow?

[Naren]

Originally Posted by wylde342

I'm using Cakewalk Sonar and we are pre recording some live use backing tracks for "Living On A Prayer" by Bon Jovi. I'm curious as to how to get those famous ridiculously big backing vocals like the song. We can all sing the parts, but I'm curious about effects/etc that would help create that "Sound."

Any ideas? All comments are appreciated and welcomed!

First, I must say that I don't remember that song or its background vocals. But that won't stop me from making a suggestion!

Since you can all sing the parts, you have an ensemble. Immediately, it occurs to me that you should all sing together in a good room, and use two mics to record the ensemble in stereo. Repeat as often as desired perhaps shuffling the singers to different places in the stereo field. This can be dramatic and it is really enjoyable listening to the results.

I don't dare suggest the stereo technique you should use - that would be up to your knowledge and experience. XY coincident is the safest but perhaps least exciting method. ORTF is a compromise which can give you nice width. Spaced omnis are another alternative I haven't used that much, but I've been made aware that it can cause mono compatibility problems. One thing I've always wanted to try is mid-side technique.

In any case, stereo recording of an ensemble is much more exciting than mono sources panned around. I apologize in advance if this isn't applicable to the song in question. And as to how that might translate to your live rig, I have no idea.

-Naren

[Bob Ross]

Originally Posted by wylde342

We can all sing the parts

Ah, but can you all sing *all* the parts?

Something I've found that works great for huge bgvox is:
- 1st pass: all singers singing their respective parts (SATB, whatever)
- 2nd pass: double-track of 1st pass
- 3rd pass: SWAP PARTS -- i.e., if you were singing the tenor line before, now sing the baritone part, have the countertenor sing the tenor part, have the bass sing the soprano, etc. Get a different person singing each of the lines, but still all singing simultaneously.
- 4th pass: double-track of 3rd pass

If I'm feeling really ostentatious and those four (stereo) tracks still aren't big enough, I have on rare occasions gone to a 5th-Nth pass (where N is the number of individual harmony parts) with everyone singing each part in unison.

More often than not though that winds up being *too* huge!

[mrufino1]

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_mike_...ing/index.html
Intervview with Mike Shipley, who engineered the Def Leppard albums int he 80's, huge backing vox on those. On a board somewhere in the past, he went into specific detail as well.
I can't remember where it's from or I would credit, but I saved it as a word doc on my computer, so here it is:
I just checked out Def's "Sugar" and it sounds like they went with the one singer approach (I didn't hear multiple timbres) doing multiple tracks with the singer going for a kinda air-y hollow style. In other sections of the song--the call+responses in the verse, harms in the Bsec + the big BGs singing the hook in all the choruses--I heard a larger "gang-style" sound, but still sounded like it may have been one singer. The verb sounded like a relatively bright plate set @ about 1sec.

For some insight, on both Pyromania + Hysteria the BGs aren't actually credited to any of the band members, only to two mystery groups: "The Leppardettes" + "The Bankrupt Brothers" respectively. But since both records BGs have a very smooth even sound which can usually only be achieved by multi-tracking one singer, I'm pretty sure it was really one person. I've heard the secret to their unique BG sound was that they were actually sung by Mutt Lange. (Apparently the same singers were available for Shania Twain's records... ;-)

Anyway, some techniques I use to achieve a gang vocal sound that you may want to try are:
• Multiple people (4-8) around the mic (as Jam said). Put the mic in omni mode (if poss.) and place everyone in a circle around it. Depending on how football/soccer stadium you are going for you can use anyone. For a real crowd effect use a mixture of people who don't normally sing (drummer, studio receptionist, assist. eng., the more off key the better sometimes) and those who can.
• In multiple passes do two passes with them singing melody in their regular register, two passes in high octave kinda girl like, and two passes of low octave.
• For an even more gangie stadium effect do two passes of high shouting, mid shouting, and low shouting.
• To insure that you will have enough in key tracks you can also do some tracks with just the real singers. By blending between the larger group and the real singer tracks you can control the gang quality.
• Optionally, during the shouting passes instruct them to change their distance from (and poss. location around) the mic between each of the six passes to change the color of the ambience as their voice interacts with the room.
• It's hard to say how many tracks is too much or little. This is clearly a taste thing, depending on the size you are going for.
• When mixing, to give the song a feeling of growth, don't use all the tracks from the start. You can use fewer tracks earlier in the song poss. leaving out the shouting tracks. Add them in (or turn them up) as the song progresses. You can optionally build the vocals by saving the higher octave tracks for the second chorus, and the lower ones for the third. Or a combination of these two approaches.
• For processing I like to bus all the tracks to a stereo bus and compress + EQ the entire blend and put any aux send effects off the processed blend.
• For effects I like using more of the split harmonizer effect (see 3rd section More Effects: Pitch Shifter — Split Harmonizer Effect) than I would normally use on anything else. Maybe -10 or -11 dB. (I normally use about -17 to -21 dB for any other vocals or instruments I may put it on.)
• I've also found that using gated reverb can really heighten the excitement of the vocals. You can make them big, with a shoutie like quality without mucking up your mix with long verb tails.
• Of course there are times when the large hall or stadium verb is exactly what is called for with these kind of vocals.
• Play around with the panning. Hard left/right can sound big, but sometimes it sounds more realistic for these kinda vocals to be panned more center. Also try fanning the vocals to give the effect that there are people standing everywhere from left to right. Keep in mind if there will be a lead vocal going on @ the same time you may want to leave some space in the center for it.
Hope you will find these ideas helpful.


For the Def Leppard backing vocals on "pour some sugar" we layered 3 people singing in unison on 20 tracks..bounce them to one track..do another 20 tracks and bounce them to one track....EQ'ing heavily on the bounces ..then we would repeat the process..we would rebounce the vocals a few times ..taking out the offensive frequencies very heavily on a narrow bandwidth first the honky frequency build up , then the shrill middle freq. the same way so the sound ends up kind of "concave" sounding with a lot of smooth high end.
One of the biggest parts of the sound though , is how Mutt would make everyone over emphasize the diction of the words...hard to explain...being animated in the pronunciation of the words gets the sound of the those B/V's....so does how tight the tracking up is...but by that record , Mutt and the Leps had had a lot of practice in tracking up vocals. With some of the 4 part harmonies we would end up with had such a distinct sound 'cos of Mutts voice. We would actually wear the tape out on the 2" because of playing and replaying the tape for months and months and......months.
We would not use reverb on the B/V's ..but I would use multi tap delays to thicken and widen the sound as much as I could..but of course , even more eq in the mix!
Hope this helps.
P.S ..."back then" we didnt have samplers and working out the offsets for the tape machines to fly the vocals was such a pain in the ass !!!
On their previous album I had to fly the vocals in to the choruses from half inch..two tracks at a time for however many pairs there were for all the harmonies and fitting it all on 24 tracks !!!
I don't take Protools for granted these days!!
I also used to have to fly in Queen's B/Vs as an assistant engineer and that was really very tricky because of so many overlapping parts its so different to how we do it now "cut and paste " wasn't even in the English language yet !!!




Shan....you are gonna laugh at this,but on both Pyromania and Hysteria we never used any mic pre's other than what were in the SSL 4K we had. Admittedly it was one of the early hand built SSl's so it had a much differend sound than whe SSL got so popular and stopped the hand building and used different parts etc. for the 4K.
For vocals we used a u67 and a good old 1176. Everything ....gtrs , drums ,vocals etc were all with the SSL pre's , we would just struggle with what we had and try to make everything sound as" un" natural as we could on purpose 'cos we knew we could make records the right way and get "natural'' sounds of drums and gtr's but we always go for something different with Mutt..and spend as long as it takes to get it..and that can be a while. The funny thing about it all was coming to the U.S. to work and the reaction from a lot of engineers and producers here in L.A was that "how dare you f**k with how records should be made" This was back in the mid 80's tho....and L.A was the home of pristine , by the book recording techniques. But the records did well and Mutt wanted to make records for the the kids next door who had just gone and seen Star Wars which was so much larger than life and would also like something different with their music ..that was his theory and he was pretty much right. He always wanted me to come up with"larger than life" (which means a blend of natural and un natural) sounds "cos he knew that kids could hear a difference, but it took a lot of messing around and experimenting to get the "total sound" we were after but it was amazing being given so much freedom to try things. Anyway Shan.sorry for the rant...hope that helps .


Hopefully it is okay and sorry for the long post!!

[mobaudio]

One to add on the pile....


Ian G's recipe for Buttrock vocals:

1. Get no more than 3 vocalists who can blend (two really good singers will work in a pinch). If any one person sticks out, this won't work.

2. Have them sing the low harmony (usually a 4th below the melody) in unison, VERY TIGHT. Make sure everyone is enunciating the same and starting and ending at the same time. Now is the time to get it right in the tracking.

3. Double that.

4. If you're feeling froggy, triple it. MAKE SURE THE TIMINGS ARE RIGHT.

5. Go back and redo the first one, but don't tell anyone (tell them you're getting the last one "one more time"). They're all used to singing it a certain way now, and a new one will match better. Actually, you may try to get the second one again, but don't tell them.

6. Now do the melody line. Make sure the timing matches the low parts. If you get it right while you're tracking, you'll know when it's working.

7. Double. (Triple if you wish) Charge a quarter for every time someone messes up. I made 7 bucks one time.

8. Now do the hi harmony, (usually the 3rd above the melody) repeat those other steps.

9. If you can get someone to do it, do a 5th above the melody (an octave above the low harmony) in full voice, not falsetto. Usually, two of the singers can hack it. That will be fine, as long as both are in tune. You only need to really do two of these.

10. So now you have Low, Mid, Hi, and Hi-Hi vocals. If you've got someone to do an octave above the melody (technical term: Bitch Hi Vocals), it'll be falsetto, and you only need one track.


Every time I stick to this plan, it works. I tried quadrupling 5 vocals on a 4 part harmony, and it didn't have the power. Probably because there were too many loose ends and too much to try to control. That, and we tried it at the end of a 12-hour vocal session...

If you double everything, try panning lows hard L&R and pan in as you go up in harmony. If you can group them all and eq the whole shebang, it's a lot easier.
Compress and reverberate to taste.

No, I did not invent this. I learned it from Bobby Barth, who learned it from... someone (I totally forgot), who learned it from...
Eventually, it gets to Mutt Lange, I'm sure. Or Roy Thomas Baker. Or George Martin. OR YOUR MOTHER!!!



I

[js1]

Recently saw the "Classic Albums - A Night at the Opera" DVD. What Bob Ross suggested above is what Queen did. The three singers (Freddy, Brian, and Roger) would sing three part harmony around one mic. Then they would swap parts, then swap parts again.

Sounded pretty big to me.

js

[rolo95]

GOld info here!!!

Txs for sharing...
Rolo.

[Rogervandeberg]

Originally Posted by rolo95

GOld info here!!!

Txs for sharing...
Rolo.

Indeed!

[Reptil]