Saturday, August 24, 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.

Rule #1. Choose your best take as the lead rap line. A lot of takes, that's the first step in recording. As much as possible, make sure that you and your voice are up for recording, this means keeping yourself hydrated with water to lubricate those vocal chords. Also, keep the mic at the same distance at all times. With a good take, compiling would be easier. If you are gifted with a silver-tongue and you can nail down the entire verse or track in one take, you should go for it. Out of all those takes, choose the best one and make it your lead vocals.

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.

Rule #4. Listen to the Final Mix. After working hard to make sure that the outcome of the recording will be up to your standards, it is time to listen to what you just did. If the double does not blend well with the lead, you might need to rehearse more to master doubling. Rehearsing to instrumental beats while practicing your vocals would be a great way to gain mastery of vocal doubling.




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