Unless you are going to record a huge crowd or chorale group (at once) for background vocals there really isn't a need to track in stereo. If its just yourself and/or one of your crew doing background vocals just track in mono (like your second scenario where you record two or more mono tracks and pan left to right). On some recordings that I have done I had five or six people doing backgrounds (all at once) and would double track or triple track them using only one mic and pan them left to right depending on how many takes we did. (this scenario can have results that are huge).

Experiment with as many techniques as you can and stick to what you like.

thanx

Recording Vocals

I need help recording my vocals. All i do is hip hop work usually on instrumentals of released songs. I work w/ pro tools and a mbox. 1st I wanna know when i drag the beat onto a traack should i turn it down? cause its already compressed and it peaks at 0db. I also have waves 5.0 but i really dont know what to do with all those plug-ins. 2nd, when i do bounce my completed song down it sounds okay, but the vocals are sometimes muddy. and i've recorded in pro studios and my 1st vocal track always sounded strong in the pro studio, but at home it sounds weak and i have to double the track entirely as opposed to just doubling some words. Please just any help on recording rap music would be helpful.

One quick piece of advice I can offer on recording hip hop vocals is the vocalist's proximity to the microphone. With rappers, the more intense the performance they intend to give, the closer and closer they want to get to the mic to the point where they're almost eating it! Second if you're doing what sounds like to be mixtapes, in which you have the vocalist reading off sheets to lyrics they just wrote, be sure that they're facing the mic and not looking down at their lyric sheets or way off left and right. Thats not going to make it sound like you want it to sound by itself but I think its a safe bet that both those situations are taking place.