IDK if anyone would be interested in such a post, but I was just watching a KG video on mixing background vocals in REAPER and found it helpful. I thought his setup was pretty interesting and creates a quick workflow. Very cool. The video is here, but the gist of it is below.
The bottom line is that one track is set up to monitor the vocals as they record, but does not record the vocals. Vocals are recorded to the actual BGV tracks. So, record monitoring is done on one track, actual recording on the other tracks.
Enjoy,
Tesgin
Start with one new track. Name it Vocal.
Ready that track to monitor recording:
Set the input so the mic is selected
Put it in record, but R-click the record button and select Record: disable (input monitoring only) - this configures the track to monitor recording only, but to not record to the track
Turn on input monitoring
Set up all background vocal tracks in advance, and monitor thru that first track:
Insert > Multiple tracksā¦>Select 6-8 tracks, and name them (it will auto-number the tracks)
Select all of the new BGV tracks (next steps will affect all tracks)
Select input to be the vocal mic
Leave input monitoring off (youāll monitor thru the first track, above)
Set panning for each of the BGV tracks: e.g., select odd tracks and pan left, even to the right. Bring their volume down a bit.
Add whatever FX you want to use
Select each BGV track you want to record to; sing doubles of each track part on successive tracks
When done, all parts should already be fairly well blended in w/o changing anything (levels or panning)
Record monitoring (of what they are singing) is done on the first track, but is recorded on the other tracks (which have monitoring turned off). So the idea is that you can turn the volume down on those tracks (or off) as you record.
Why wouldnāt you want them to hear the harmonies along with the main vox, instruments, etc.? Iām thinking it allows them to blend their timing and volume better. No? But again, you can turn it all off.
The idea is that having the vocalist be able to listen thru a separate monitoring of their voice (maybe with itās own FX?), independent of what is recorded to track could have itās own benefits.
Would be interested in hearing the approach others have to recording BGV. What do you do, Vaughan?
I have an input channel and a whole lot of other unbalanced/unpanned channels to dump tracks to ALL MUTED (Cmd/T is the shortcut in Reaper). Once we record a harmony to the lead vocal guide track, which is admittedly turned down quite a bit, I push the new harmony to a muted track so we both canāt hear it while recording the next oneā¦
90% of my vocalists donāt want to hear themselves on other tracks, they just want to pitch āone timeā to the lead vocal. Maybe Iām weird, but thats the way Iāve always done it.
PS. Iāve NEVER recorded Queen, (yes, I watched the movie) but Iāve worked with a man who hasā¦
I tend to do things the āold manā way. First I render an instrument mix down to a single stereo track. Then I insert that track into a new session. This way I can easily create a monitor mix while recording vocals. Then I do any required editing to the vocal tracks before inserting them back into the original session for mixing.
This is probably a good way to do this, @ocnor, actually rendering the bvox to stereo would probably help reduce the track count quite a bit , or just mix them and hide the tracks, which I should probably do as its maybe a little quicker.
Yeah, actually, I āthinkā it would work beautifully with your work flow as you described it; just mute all of the BGV tracks during recording. The clever piece is that the track that monitors the vocals during recording doesnāt record the vocals: the vocals are recorded to their own tracks which are muted.
I agree, Kenny is impressive. Plus, how cool is that last name!
ok, I will have to try itā¦ Kennyās thing. I love his stuff so much, apart from his website. He has totally ditched PT for Reaper, Iām lovin it.
Anyway, I usually ask the talent, in a nice way, likeā¦ " you guys canāt pitch for shit if you hear yourselves in the cans, do you want to or not?"
Then they say no. And I prefer that.
Just last week, I forgot to mute a harmony track for one take, and Iām like, āWTF was that?ā - āyou sound JUST like the bastard machine!ā
And they literally harmonised EXACTLY like the digital shitbox would have done. With a dissonant note in there. I ended up muting that āwordā. It actually sounds ācoolā like that.
