Hey guys (and gals),

How are you?

Well, to make a long story short, I've been trying to make my own album. It's been a long time I want to do that and now I'm making it real.

Music has always been part of my life but it's the first time I'm trying to compose my own material.

I've been studying mixing techniques like crazy for quite some time and I'm really enjoying all the process.

Anyway, I'd like to know if you guys have any unusual creative techniques for processing vocals, you know, something that goes beyond classic techniques like "artificial double tracking" and "NY parallel compression"...Not only vocals, by the way; Feel free to share any particularly creative and unique mixing techniques and strategies.

As an example, sometimes I like to distort the hell out of my vocals on two parallel tracks, one panned hard left and the other hard right, one with a HPF and the other with a LPF, keeping the original main vocal track centered. This way, I can control how much harmonic "spice" I want in the low and high ends, and have total control about how to properly distribute and balance the "magic dust" in the stereo field. This technique is really useful for rock songs, in my opinion. It really helps to thicken things up if you manage to set the levels of each track properly.

I'm just a noob in this area, but as a creative professional, I'm well aware that unusual and unconventional approaches, that go beyond what you usually find in the books, are very valuable.

So, that's it. I'd really appreciate if you could share part of your knowledge.

Cheers,

Raf.

 

Great thread, weird but I've been thinking about opening a thread like this for a long time now. I am particularly interested in creative techniques for Industrial music.

 

Probably the most 'creative' thing i've done with vocals recently is to double a vocal, and put Autotune+MIDI sidechain on the copy to (re)create backup vocals. The MIDI notes control the pitch of the vocal copy, which are of course different to the original. Though, it's not particularly creative since it's one of the uses mentioned in the manual.

 

Here's something cool you can do. Put any delay like a ping pong delay or your favorite plugin on a return track. After the delay plugin use a flanger plugin. Send some if that flangered delay effect to some vocals, synths or pretty much anything else and you'll be hearing some really cool things happening. Mess around with the flanger settings You could substitute the flanger with a chorus, or phases, or pretty much anything that modulates the sound.

 

Try to apply a phaser on a send reverb and then mix with the dry track... It sounds good on vocals when are few tracks (or none) playing together, but you can try this with a lot of instruments...

 

Another old trick is to sing with very low volum almost whisper on one track
And then of course the very common use of copy the take to two other tracks and delaying those track a few ms (around 15-30) use - for one track and + for the other track

 

Vox:
Take your processed vocals centered, add 2 FX-channels, one with reverb, one with delay, pan one left the other one right, can be cool.

Drums:
On drums like AD, superior drummer or ez drummer, I like to use some samples of other kits/libraries/recordings/ and double/layer the "real sounding" one, beefing it up a little.

GTR: Not very creative, rather basic, but I do use mostly different EQ settings on my hard left/right panned guitars, especially when recorded with two guitars and/or amps, find sweet spot of that one guitar, cut that on the other and vice versa.

Bass: I mostly use a copy of the basses DI-track (or saw waves and what not) and play around with saturation, compressing, EQing. If bass tracks don't cut through, even though your low end is clean in your mix, try to add some low-mid EQ.
(I use it pretty much for all genres, just different amounts of the effected signal, from psytrance to jazz, just tweak to taste)

Hope it helps someone to get new ideas at least

 

Try using amp emulations on drums and percussion you'll get some really cool sound effects.

 

vocal is best in mono, you can always add some 3d-ness via the aux busses. for me the best tool to add character to a vocal is via some tape-saturation, which can handle various things, eq-comp-sat. and this is u-he satin. on the auxes i have ambient/room/hall/delay1-2/and some analog emu bus(hp-lp filters and a furher saturator just to take away the digital harshness.