Vocal "crowd yell" effect

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 1:17 pm

Anyone have any tips on recording a large vocal "crowd shout"? For example, the tail of the choruses on Atreyu's "Falling Down" from the album Lead Saild Paper Anchor, or the beginning of "Lay Your Hands On Me" by Bon Jovi? I am trying to make it sound like a very unison, very tight "yell" and would like to avoid recording twenty five tracks of the same line. (It is difficult to get it tight enough using this approach, and occupies quite a chunk of disc space). Just curious if there may be another approach that the pros use to create this effect. Any advise is much appreciated!! Thanks!!

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:34 pm

No chance you could get twenty-five people in the vocal booth and record them on a single track?

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:37 pm

I wish, but it is a 4 x 4 (width) vocal booth!!

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 9:29 pm

do 'em one at the time Smile

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 9:59 pm

Still creates a problem with too many tracks, right?

How portable is your recording system? You could move to a more open space and record them all if you've got a lappy.

Or a few at a time? You could uncomfortably fit 3 or 4 people in there (depending, of course, on how many headphones you can summon up. Accio headphones.) Record three or four of those tracks or something.

I don't know a mixing-end trick, though. Can't help there, sorry.

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:35 pm

Run a chorus effect into a chorus effect and set each to generate an additional 4 voices. Gives you an effective 25 voices.
Just don't split them too much in time or it'll sound stupid.

Correction: more stupid than it would've done.

Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:28 am

Do all things mentioned above, record 25 tracks, then bounce them to one and delete the originals to save disk space.

To get them tight, I would just select them all, cut them to the same place and use a very short fade in and fade out. All aligned perfectly and edited simultaneously. Maybe even let a couple of the up front ones stay slightly sloppy to give the realistic feel. I do this a lot with full band stops in music and it works like a charm if you do it right. Kind of like manual gating. Just another idea. Smile

Otherwise... there has to be a harmonizer out there that can handle this. Or just line up a ton of pitch shifters with formant controls.

Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:11 pm

Record a bunch of your friends in front of the console - you included (bigger room, right?).

Do enough tracks until it sounds right.

Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2008 8:55 am

Get lots of people and don't use the vocal both , use your live room or Garage or basement or living room or
whatever

Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:45 pm

Use a bedroom, whatever, and set up a condenser mic. you don't have to worry so much about vocal tonality, as the focus is more on intensity.

Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 11:00 pm

How about being cool enough to get on stage in front of a crowd and then getting them to do it?

Why fake it when you can make it?

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 11:40 pm

Greener wrote:

How about being cool enough to get on stage in front of a crowd and then getting them to do it?

Why fake it when you can make it?

Bingo!

I've put people into booths and also just done it en masse within a relatively quiet environment. Both techniques worked, but the second has always yielded me the best results.

YMMV.

Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:56 pm

I've found that its much better to double or quad track a small group of people doing this, around 4 people who all know the song very well.
This keeps it a lot tighter than using 10+ people.
More benefits of doing it this way include adding / removing tracks to increase / decease intensity.
Different processing on each track.
Being able to pan them individually.

Good luck!

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