Mixing Main Vocals & Overdubs

[Fluency]

what's the best technique for doing this... i've heard of numerous techniques from different ppl.

i've heard of one "ricky martin" technique for the main vocal alone... where you leave it panned to the center of course, & then take duplicate copies & pan one to the left at 10 o'clock & one to the right at 2 o'clock to add warmth.

on the overdubs... is it better to pan them entirely to the left & vice versa, or like the technique above, at 10 & 2?

a lot of ppl have also told me that adding a slight delay to the dubs mixes in well but distinguishes it from main vocals. any advice?

[Ronny]

Originally Posted by Fluency

what's the best technique for doing this... i've heard of numerous techniques from different ppl.

i've heard of one "ricky martin" technique for the main vocal alone... where you leave it panned to the center of course, & then take duplicate copies & pan one to the left at 10 o'clock & one to the right at 2 o'clock to add warmth.

on the overdubs... is it better to pan them entirely to the left & vice versa, or like the technique above, at 10 & 2?

a lot of ppl have also told me that adding a slight delay to the dubs mixes in well but distinguishes it from main vocals. any advice?

I believe the technique that you are talking about does not add warmth as it doesn't alter tonal sonics. If you center pan a vocal and than copy it to two more tracks and pan them equidistant from center at 10 and 2 o'clock at the same spot on the timeline as the original, you are only increasing gain due to double bussing, actually triple bussing in this case, not warming up the signal unless of course you used analog circuits in the copy. The Ricky Martin technique probably is closer to a technique that we called post frame pasting in the olden days, where you copy the original center panned track and paste it to the other two tracks a few ms. or subframes later. This doesn't add warmth but adds more fullness to the vocal track. It's a simulation of overdubbing a second and third vocal take, however when I first discovered the technique back in the early 90's when I first started editing digital, I went a little hog wild and regret some of the songs that I hear now a days that I used the technique on, but anyway, without the timing delay on the copied tracks, you are only going to increase the perception of the vocals gain, not getting more warmth or more stereo field image. You have to delay the copied tracks to perceive the stereo image fuller. BTW, you can also do this in a digital console by not copying tracks, just by using two busses and delaying the busses slightly different from the channel that is carrying the original timeline vocal track and than panning the bussed to channels 10 and 2. That's what the people that related adding the delay to the submixes are talking about. Same results as post frame pasting.

As far as giving guidlines on what pan settings to use, that's pert near impossible without hearing the material at issue. A song that has a lot of center energy may sound better with the pans going harder L and R and one with lot's of side information and less center image may sound better with the post frame tracks at 10 and 2, so you need to play that by ear. The key is the delay between the copied tracks and the original that is to be center panned. Start with slight delays of 30ms or less, when you get above 30ms, you start hearing an actual delay instead of the thicker layered sound and it's not unlike adding too much reverb or delay to the single vocal track.

Also I forgot to mention that you can often get better results by lowering the gain on the copied tracks a little below the centered track levels.