Thursday, August 22, 2013

4 Ways To Make Vocal Doubling In Hip Hop Better

By Frank Lubsey


Hip hop is not just about instrumental beats. It is also about powerful vocals! In this music genre, an effective technique to engage the attention of listeners and to make rap lines more interesting is through vocal doubling. Hip hop and rock commonly involve vocal doubling. This transforms a song into a wonderful combination of words and instrumental beats that allows it to captivate its listeners. The primary goal of this technique is to make the main vocal rap more powerful. This can be applied to a choice of word for emphasis, to a single line, a verse or even the entire song. But there are a few ground rules that you should observe to make sure that you are doing it right.

Use the best take as the lead. Recording a hip hop track involves a lot of takes. Before hitting the recording studio, ensure that your voice is at its best. Hydrating to keep the vocal cords lubricated is an easy way to do this. When singing, keep the mic at a constant distance throughout the recording. Compiling your track will be much easier if you perform your best during takes. If you believe that you can complete the entire verse or even track on a single take, prepare for it and then go for it. After a couple of good takes, select the best take and use it as the lead.

Select a double for the lead. After making a couple of takes and selecting your lead rap, you can select another take and use it as the leads double. This is based on how closely it sounds like the lead. If you're into flowing and free styling, this might be hard. In this case, you will have to make another take that sounds closest to the lead rap. An easy way to achieve this is listening to the lead and rapping along. You can wear one headset to make it easy to rap along.

Keep the doubles hidden from the listeners. The goal of vocal doubling is hiding the double by making the lead prominent. That is, there won't be the illusion of doubling within the track. To do this, keep the volume of the double significantly lower than that of the lead during recording. A popular way of doing this is keeping the double loudness at 10 to 12dB. This makes the double vocals louder without exposing the fact that it's a double. Vocal doubling can be used to create a spacious effect. To do this, 2 doubles are used. Pan one double .10 seconds to the right and the other .10 seconds to the left. This delays the track by .10 seconds on one part as well as times it to start .10 second early.

Listen to the final production. After mixing the vocal doubles, it's now time to listen to the final production. If you follow the instructions mentioned above, you will easily create vocal doubles that blend well. If the final recording is not what you are targeting, more practice might be necessary to prefect doubling. A great way is to practice using the beats and instrumentals at the same time as training your vocals.




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