How to widen vocals space/perception?

[Slugworth]

Thanks. That's the only studio I've contacted so far. Most local studios seem to be more hip-hop and rap oriented, but that may not matter as far as mastering goes.

With a cool name like Vlado I would expect him to be very good.

 

[shredd]

I will second several posters' contention that using a few m/sec delay on a copy of a vocal track needs to be done carefully & tastefully.
When I first experimented with this technique, I got some very noticeable results right off the bat...but on more listenings, more experimentation, and more tasteful use of the technique, I realized that I had seriously abused the technique.

PS - the tune @-mjk- used to demonstrate how well this can be done is not only an excellent application of this technique...but pretty kewl song!!!

 

[Slugworth]

Is the precedence effect also known as the Haas effect?

https://youtube.com/shorts/eoV5gFTBYW8?feature=share

 

[-mjk-]

Yes.

 

[-mjk-]

Sometimes I’ll get a tune to mix and it might have a single acoustic guitar and a vocal. In order to make the guitar wider so there’s a space in the center for the lead vocal, here’s what I do: I duplicate the guitar track on two tracks and pan them hard left and right. I’ll pick a track, and it doesn’t matter which one it is, and I will nudge it by 1 ms toward the rear, so it is 1 ms behind the first track. I will keep nudging the track 1 ms by 1 ms until I get the desired effect that I want. And sometimes after that I will pan the hard left and right a little bit towards the center so it sounds a bit more natural. On top of that I will build some kind of a digital reverb room and put the acoustic guitar in that room along with the vocal. I do a whole bunch of stuff to the vocals after that, but I just wanted to mention a guitar widening effect that I sometimes use. There’s no reason you can't do the same thing with a vocal track, just bear in mind that if it’s too far on the outside, it leaves a hole in the center. However, if you had two or three harmony background vocal tracks and you did that technique for each one, that would be an effective way to make the background vocals wider so you can place the lead vocal in the center.

 

[-mjk-]

PS - the tune @-mjk- used to demonstrate how well this can be done is not only an excellent application of this technique...but pretty kewl song!!!

Thanks @shredd. I recorded the basic tracks for that tune in 1991 at Longview Farm Studios with Jesse Henderson engineering. We were in the famous Studio B, with the stage that they had built for the Rolling Stones, and the whole thing was in a barn. Occasionally, we had to pause, and do a retake when one of the horses neighed or kicked the stall, lol. Robert Ellis played the orchestral parts on the Kurzweil 2000 from the score written by the late Thomas F. Piemonte, the composer of the song. I got half songwriting credits because of the arrangement that I did and my contribution to the song overall. Mr. Piemonte had written over 40 songs for me to sing, and I never got around to doing them. His brother still has the catalog of songs and I’m more than likely going to do a couple of them for him, posthumously. We did the rest of the overdubs in our main studio and mixed it in a third studio. There are 12 background vocal tracks and they are tripled and panned LCR. The microphone is a Neumann U48 into a Pultec EQ1 and LA2A into the API desk. That's all the info I can think of. It was released in 1995.

 

[Slugworth]

Sometimes I’ll get a tune to mix and it might have a single acoustic guitar and a vocal. In order to make the guitar wider so there’s a space in the center for the lead vocal, here’s what I do: I duplicate the guitar track on two tracks and pan them hard left and right. I’ll pick a track, and it doesn’t matter which one it is, and I will nudge it by 1 ms toward the rear, so it is 1 ms behind the first track. I will keep nudging the track 1 ms by 1 ms until I get the desired effect that I want. And sometimes after that I will pan the hard left and right a little bit towards the center so it sounds a bit more natural. On top of that I will build some kind of a digital reverb room and put the acoustic guitar in that room along with the vocal. I do a whole bunch of stuff to the vocals after that, but I just wanted to mention a guitar widening effect that I sometimes use. There’s no reason you can do the same thing with a vocal track, just bear in mind that if it’s too far on the outside, it leaves a hole in the center. However, if you had two or three harmony background vocal tracks and you did that technique for each one, that would be an effective way to make the background vocals wider so you can place the lead vocal in the center. However, if you had two or three harmony background vocal tracks and you did that technique for each one, that would be an effective way to make the background vocals wider so you can place the lead vocal in the center.

If you go that far too make an acoustic and vocal track sound wider (better), then I can now blame my shitty vocals on the lack there of....lol.

 

[shredd]

then I can now blame my shitty vocals on the lack there of

As a card-carrying World Champion of bad singers, I empathize, @Slugworth …
And it’s true that you can’t make a bad recording sound good (modern country music notwithstanding). I should know.

But the point of tunes like @-mjk- ’s is that a decent (or excellent) recording can be made to sound aMAZing by good production/mixing/mastering. Something to strive for, as you are. Go dood!!!

I’m sorry I don’t have the link handy…but somewhere on the forum is a ytube of a guy mixing a song by one of those hip neo-country chix.
They took her original track (a very ordinary-sounding vocal), and spent an hour long video demonstrating how they copied it six times, treating each track differently with EQ and compression and delay and other fx, then intricately mixed them in just the right proportions at the right times to make it sound the way they wanted.
That is how production is done these days.

 

[Mark Richards]

The original question was how to widen vocals...this song that Mark Richards had done...in this thread.

I'm late to the party, so I'll just comment on how I mixed the lead vocal in the song mj made reference to in that thread (Talk to Me Baby, Zane Carney & Friends).

There are three lead vox tracks. Vox 1 is the original live recording of the lead. Vox 2 and Vox 3 was overdubbed later in the studio (possibly at the same time rather than one after the other, because two different mics were used - a Telefunken U47 and a Telefunken C12; and my aging ears couldn't detect any performance differences.).

The Vox 1 live track performance was noticeably different from the two overdub tracks, such that when mixed at equal dB levels, the Vox 1 track made it sound like two people singing in unison. Vox 1 also had noticeable instrument bleed.

To mix the lead vocal I used the studio Vox 2 (U47 mic) overdub track panned Left at 10 0'clock; and the studio Vox 3 (C12 mic) overdub track panned Right at 2 o'clock. The fader levels were set identically at -6.3 dB for these two tracks.

I pulled the Vox 1 track down to -17.7 dB and centered it. I used this basically as an FX track to enhance the slap echo effect I was shooting for.

All three tracks were sent to a Vox submix bus and also to a Vox muti FX bus that processed all the lead and harmony vocals together using several different delays and reberbs in series.

The Vox FX Bus signal processing chain:

EQ notch filter to handle plosives.
High and Low pass filters to better focus the vocals' frequency range.
Slap Echo & Plate Reverb FX.
Mild compression to help control the singer's dynamic range.
A second Reverb post fader to enhance further the lead vocal characteristics I was shooting for.​

 

[-mjk-]

. The Vox FX Bus signal processing chain:
EQ notch filter to handle plosives.
High and Low pass filters to better focus the vocals' frequency range.
Slap Echo & Plate Reverb FX.
Mild compression to help control the singer's dynamic range.
A second Reverb post fader to enhance further the lead vocal characteristics I was shooting for.

A very effective chain! This is gold for new engineers.

Some may be wondering why there are high and low pass filters in this chain, which essentially create a bandpass filter. That keeps all the unnecessary energy from taking up bandwidth and causing intermodulation distortion, and also overreaction in the dynamic processing further down the chain.

I came to the exact same conclusion you did about those tracks, Mark, so I simply used the U47 track only.

 

[-mjk-]

5 Unique Ideas for Enhancing Stereo Image

 

[Mark Richards]

...Telefunken U47 and a Telefunken C12...to mix the lead vocal I used the studio Vox 2 (U47 mic) overdub track panned Left at 10 0'clock; and the studio Vox 3 (C12 mic) overdub track panned Right at 2 o'clock...

I forgot to mention that I used different EQ settings to bring out the natural frequency distinctions of each mic. C12 U47

This, together with the signal processing of the stereo vox multi-Fx buss helped produce a perceived wider center image of the vocal. This approach is similar in concept to the SplitEq approach described in the above post.

 

[Slugworth]

Good info. Thanks, Mark.