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I have been working on a project of mine that I think could use a crowd effect. By that I mean I want parts of the song to sound like there is a crowd in the background calling back on certain ques. I have tried two different approaches, and they sound, well... fake.

first, I set up a mic and had a small group sing/shout. I doubled some of the tracks and tried throwing different eqs and reverb on them, but it wasn't what I wanted. my second approach was to mic one person at a time and double the tracks, but before long I had a ton of tracks, and not a very good sound.

Are there any other teqnices I could use? Any advice from Micing to mixing would be helpful. Thanks.

Comments

thatjeffguy Sat, 07/24/2010 - 10:05

Once I needed the sound of a large choir on a song. I set up a pair of mics in M/S arrangement. I only had about six people, but I had them sing the same part in three different positions in the studio: left, right and center, while the mics stayed in one spot. I also mixed up their position relative to each other each time I had them move. The second and third takes were sung with the first take being played back in their headphones. Worked like a charm, very natural sounding.
Jeff

JohnTodd Mon, 07/26/2010 - 19:28

I did mine by just overdubbing repeatedly. My GF and I did it over and over again...uhm, that is to say, we overdubbed again and again for a total of 107 voices. :)

Selected tracks were chorused individually, ie, different settings on each.

We read from The Beatles Recording Sessions and The Tecumseh Small Engine Repair Manual! When it was all over, you couldn't tell what we were saying because there of so much overlapping sound.

RemyRAD Thu, 07/29/2010 - 12:58

Here's a little tip. I recorded a lot of commercial jingle musics back in the late 1970s. One of the tricks to use when overdubbing is to leave the microphone in a single position. Then you move the people different distances from the microphone on each pass. The slight differences in the timings of sound source to diaphragm makes a huge difference in the end result. If you stay in the same position and keep the microphone in the same position, you'll end up with a phasey quality or lack thereof. And it will sound, um, fake. And you probably won't need to use much equalization other than a little high pass filtering or low-frequency cut which is the same thing in case you haven't been listening?

Rub the overdub
Mx. Remy Ann David