Help With Mixing Vocal Stacks

[J Twin]

A guy I'm working with had a singer come in and do a hook. They recorded 25 tracks of the hook, vocals runs, and adlibs. I'm not a pro engineer and am not used to mixing vocal stacks. I believe I have 8 takes of the hook itself: 2 lows, 3 mids, and 3 highs. How do I arrange these in terms of EQ'ing (each one separately?), and panning (if needed)? Is it normal to use reverb/delay/chorus on some of the stack and not others? Also, with the vocals adlibs/runs, I assume I'd pan those L and R, but can y'all GS heads give me some ideas on how you'd normally do this?

1

[macproductions]

after you clean up the tracks and pan them, bounce the separate tracks to separate stereo groups, then you can then buss the different stacks to individual aux tracks and compress/eq the stacks via each aux track separately....

[vaesion]

Originally Posted by macproductions

after you clean up the tracks and pan them, bounce the separate tracks to separate stereo groups, then you can then buss the different stacks to individual aux tracks and compress/eq the stacks via each aux track separately....

when u say clean up i assume u mean remove noise..........is there a good reason why u pan them first before bouncing?

[vaesion]

do u deess each track seperately before bouncing the group, or dess as groups for best sound?

[J Twin]

Originally Posted by macproductions

after you clean up the tracks and pan them, bounce the separate tracks to separate stereo groups, then you can then buss the different stacks to individual aux tracks and compress/eq the stacks via each aux track separately....

I assume "clean up" means muting the in-between silence, gating, and de-essing? Should I pan the eight takes out in a spread, ie. -60, -40, -20, 0, 0, 0, 20, 40, 60?

[macproductions]

Originally Posted by vaesion

do u deess each track seperately before bouncing the group, or dess as groups for best sound?

Yes i mean clean everything up because once u bounce them down to stereo stems everything should already be clean and panned. It saves you track space and less confusion too within your mixer..especially when using a computer because you dont have to scroll all over the place trying to find a saprano part.

[macproductions]

Originally Posted by J Twin

I assume "clean up" means muting the in-between silence, gating, and de-essing? Should I pan the eight takes out in a spread, ie. -60, -40, -20, 0, 0, 0, 20, 40, 60?

It depends on what you're trying to achieve and the type of music.....generally i pan my BG vocals hard left and right in pairs of 2.....so out of your 8 4 would be left and the other 4 would be right with each harmony on both sides equally.

[J Twin]

Originally Posted by macproductions

It depends on what you're trying to achieve and the type of music.....generally i pan my BG vocals hard left and right in pairs of 2.....so out of your 8 4 would be left and the other 4 would be right with each harmony on both sides equally.

It's a 88 bpm track, kinda clubbish, kinda Manny Fresh-ish. The kid singing the hook sounds like Junior Reed in tonal quality and style. These aren't BG vocals, though - they're the hook itself.

Also, no stems here; I'm mixing in Sonar, not PT. Although, if the track gets good hood response off my mix, we'll spend the loot to get it professionally done in PT later.

[macproductions]

You can still use the same concept because you dont want the hook to be clouding the middle of your mix where the lead rapper is going to fall..

[vaesion]

Originally Posted by macproductions

You can still use the same concept because you dont want the hook to be clouding the middle of your mix where the lead rapper is going to fall..

after u mix ur beat do u bounce it down to a 2 track and eq and compress that to make the vox set real clear on it?

[nukmusic]

Originally Posted by macproductions

after you clean up the tracks and pan them, bounce the separate tracks to separate stereo groups, then you can then buss the different stacks to individual aux tracks and compress/eq the stacks via each aux track separately....

yeppp

but you don't have to bound the tracks. Just bus their ouputs to an aux track(group). Adding EQ, compression, etc, etc to that aux track vs each individual track.

[macproductions]

Yeah I know. I was just referring to cleaning things up and if you had limited track count as on an LE setup.