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Mixing advice please!

static-oceans

I feel so high in the blue, blue sky
Dec 2, 2019
68
24
hey guys! so if any of you guys are good with mixing, could you tell me how you can achieve the choir-like effect that's in this: it's most prominent at 1:00. Maybe my ears are bad but i'm having a hard time picking out harmonies, but it definitely sounds like there are multiple voices, and i have no idea how to approach this. I can't find any info online on how to do this
 
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AALLF

I create symphonic metal/rock using Gumi.
May 20, 2020
95
United States
www.youtube.com
The beginning part of the song, if I'm not mistaken, has the voice harmonies panned out a little bit.

Then, when the lyric part comes in around 0:21, it sounds like the main vocal is in the middle, and there are two other vocal parts panned hard left and right, all singing in unison. Those hard panned vocals sound like they raised the breathiness parameter very high. If you are using one voice synth, you can export one "breathy" track, import it in your DAW, make a copy of that track, and set the copy on a 20-30ms delay to get that spread. Then pan hard left and right.

At the 1:00 mark, it sounds like they combined the intro vocal harmonies with those breathy vocals and the main lyric voice in the middle. It is a dense texture, and I don't know if I could pick out every pitch either. I would just follow the chord progression and go from there. It uses the dorian mode.

I hope any of this helps you from my quick listen
 

inactive

Passionate Fan
Jun 27, 2019
179
This won' t help with the harmonies, but some of the sound texture may have been created with a fancy delay effect. If you don't have such a beast, Valhalla's Supermassive is free, high quality, and its "Chorus" and "Ensemble" presets should give you something that approximates the above textures (with a bit of tweaking, of course).
 
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mobius017

Aspiring ∞ Creator
Apr 8, 2018
1,981
This is just based on what I'm hearing and is kind of a shot in the dark, but it sounds like at 1:00 there's the primary vocal and then one or more backing vocals that are just doing more or less continuous "Ah"s. Like AALF said, they probably have their breathiness turned up really high, and the volume on them is pretty low. I assume they're pitched in some kind of chord arrangement with the main vocal (though I couldn't tell you which one). Like parallax_fifths mentioned, there could be some other effects on the "Ah"s, too.

Hope that helps; it's not the most specific analysis, I guess.
 
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AALLF

I create symphonic metal/rock using Gumi.
May 20, 2020
95
United States
www.youtube.com
thank you so much! this this is super helpful!!
Hey, I listened to it some more and might have figured out the chord progression for you from 0:10 - 0:21 and where it repeats. You've probably figured some of this out, but it is in C minor (with a little bit of dorian):

VI9, i7, VII, III7

Try these notes as a starting point:

Chord 1: Ab, Eb, G, Bb
Chord 2: C, Eb, G, Bb
Chord 3: Bb, D, F, Bb
Chord 4: Eb, G, Bb, D

Some of those chord in the song might not be "full", as in they may be leaving the third out in a few instances. But I hope that gives you a good starting point. Experiment with the panning to get that sound.
 
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Cyana

The Kagamines are my children
May 25, 2018
24
Australia
Chorus and delay effects are useful for getting this kind of sound. Most daws come with a stock plugin for each of these, but there's many free/cheap ones that can be used as well, for different sounds. You can also use things like vocoders to big, full, robot-like choir sounds, but they tend to be neither free nor cheap unfortunately.

One thing that's worth noting about using the same voice wav file and panning it hard left+right alongside the centre - if it is the same file, with no changes, it will make the vocal sound louder, but it won't make it sound fuller and get this choir effect. With human singers, you just get the singer to record a bunch of different takes, as each one will naturally vary and can be used pretty much straight away for choruses. With vocaloids, you have to make each of the takes vary with tuning. Changing parameters globally on the backups (breathiness, gender, etc) can be a good way to start differentiating them. You also wouldn't want them to have the exact same tuning nuances as the lead vocal - in general, backup vocals are more pitch corrected and less dynamic, so getting rid of big pitch/dynamic edits will help differentiate them as well. Lowering the brightness compared to the main vocal will also help them sit behind it and give them a different tone.

Of course, even with editing the voice in this way, Vocaloid is still drawing from the same recorded sample, which is where delay/chorus plugins come in. They shift the timing of the vocals, so the same samples aren't playing at the exact same time and just boosting volume instead of filling out the sound. They also can add some artificial variance to the sound - I don't know exactly how it works, but they can add subtle pitch/dynamic fluctuations to the sound to help differentiate it. The timing part of delay can be achieved by dropping the file in and manually dragging it back on the timeline, but it won't add the pitch/dynamic variations this way.

In terms of how to add this to a song - start by rendering your main vocal, then render your backup vocals with tweaked parameters to differentiate them (try make them different to each other, too). Drop them all in your daw. Don't put any delay on your main vocal directly. Add delay to your backups, and make it 100% wet, so none of the same-timing-as-lead sound is coming through. Tweak the delay time to taste - for chorus about 30ms is a good place to start, but you can even go as high as 100+ depending on the song tempo/the kind of sound you want. You want them all to be different from each other. There may be other controls on the plugin such as lfo or modulation depth - these control the subtle variance of the delayed file. I'd recommend making these slightly different for each double. There may also be controls for spread, feedback, etc. These are more for delay effects than chorus effects, but you can play with them to see what they do and see if they help you get the sound you want. Spread could be v helpful
 
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Oct 19, 2020
11
Cool song! The part at 1:00 has a top vocal line singing notes 5, 7, 4, 7, major 6, 5, 4, 5 (as in degrees of the minor scale). It sounds like the lower part is a drone on the first degree of the scale (and then dropping down to 7). I think there's maybe another part somewhere between those two. At one point it sounds like there's a stacked 4ths chord, with notes 1, 4, and 7 in the three parts. It's quite hard to make out though I'm not sure about the harmony parts. Sounds cool though. hope that helps a bit.
 
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