Vocal Editing

I've been working with a band named Doc Holliday. I'm making a demo EP for them with my class and after we did our Vocal Overdubs I thought I would post a bit it.

The vocals sounded good in the mic and we didn't have a live room to put him in so we needed to do the Vox OD in the control room so it was monitored over headphones. In the headphones the vocals sounded good but as soon as we put them to ANY set of monitors they suddenly sounded muffled, muddy, and masked. I spent a lot of time adjusting a couple different EQs on his vocals to try and fit them into the mix. After I have the assignment handed in maybe I'll post a before and after sample of the vocals. I used an EQ removing some 125Hz and 250Hz and added some frequencies in the upper mid range and that really added clarity to everything. I also did some volume automation to bring up key words in the vocal and slowly bring down the held words to define what he was saying. These two things made a world of difference! It as like 2 different vocal takes entirely and I didn't touch Auto-Tune! The band didn't want anything tuned and wanted everything to sound as live as possible (there's actually a few things I did to achieve a live as possible sound, but that is a different post).

One song i was editing was very very VERY trippy song and there where a few vocal parts I really wanted to "fuck with" so to speak. This song was basically an acid trip and I was doing everything in my power to encourage it. One thing I did was I doubled the vocals in parts. I would copy the vocal part to a different track and move the copied region ever to slightly so the time delay was unnoticeable but it was enough to add extra body. I was doing this "in the box" and didn't have access outboard gear so I couldn't do the "using efx as a processor" trick so this is what i did to compensate. And of course I used pan as an efx. Nothing creepier then hearing a huge vocal scream and then hearing him whisper in your ear.