Doubling Tracks - The Best Ways (And Worst Way) To Add That Doubled Track Feel

a friend Chris van driver here from Y Logic Pro rolls comm the website that helps you get the most you can out of Apple's Logic Pro 10 today I want to talk about duplicating or doubling guitar tracks vocal tracks anything that you might want to add some extra width you want to add some power some extra oomph I've been seeing something in a lot of logic projects as of late that I think we need to correct we need to examine deconstruct so we can do a better job at doubling our tracks so let's say you have a vocal track or a guitar track that you want to double you want a hard pan the vocal or the guitar to the left have another version hard pan to the right to add with that power all these nice things this is not the right way to go about that and then we'll examine some better ways so first I have an old project from beginning of 2019 and let's just take a quick listen we have guitar we have bass we have drums and for now we're gonna have just the one guitar track down the center let's take a listen [Music] [Applause] okay sounded pretty good so let's try doubling this guitar so let's duplicate the track Lane using command D or you can just use the button right up here and I'm gonna option click and drag down so now we've got technically two guitar tracks right we've got this one region and this new region that we duplicated okay so let's now hardpan both guitar tracks now let's take a listen I don't know if you're catching that let me solo these regions for you and let's listen to what's going on here it's kind of weird right we have two guitar tracks they're hard panned this is solo this one region here real quick double check ok that's to the left okay to the right once again these guitar tracks are some tamaño what's going on here I mean technically we have two guitar tracks what's going on is is that these are the exact same region they're the exact same performance the exact same timing the exact same pitch the exact same so there's nothing that differentiates these two regions from each other I mean let's just go into the mixer here let me row the gain plug-in right on here and invert the phase take a listen now yeah there's nothing differentiating these two so there's no way for us to get that doubled wide guitar effect or if we doubled and moved both guitars to the left really all we're doing is making the same guitar performance louder and you could achieve that just by you know go into that guitar track and turning up the fader so how do we create a doubled effect ideally you would have another take another performance even if you're an amazing studio musician every time you do a take even if you get super close you're still gonna have some minor variations in the performance timing pulling on the string slight pitch variations just very very very slight variations that make it very clear that these are two different performances and I have that right here so I have a guitar take here that is totally separate so this gives us that doubled why didn't it affect you know just make sure to move this pan over here brilliant so if you've recorded vocals or guitar or anything more than once I would go through those other takes and then your take folder or track alternatives and try to pick one that sounds good that you can use on another track Lane what would be ideal is to record one pass of the guitar through the song and then another pass of the guitar through the song two different takes or polling different takes from a take folder to create two different takes but let's assume that this is just the one guitar track that I have you know the guitar is played through the song once and that was it so now it's up to me to create a duplicate track another option we could use is to pull the chorus guitar part from chorus to and copy and paste it on another track Lane two chorus one and vice versa of course one into chorus two so let's check that out let's duplicate and just to make sure that this lines right up okay sure does so option click and drag and now let's bring this up right to the other chorus and let's now hard pan and then solo and check it out so you can hear those variations now they're not perfect all the time but this is a better solution because then we can fine-tune using flex time or just chopping up the region and just you know fine tune the performance this is much better than just duplicating the region but check it out let's look at the end of the region here so they're not the same performance so this is a problem at this section of the song and then if I try to copy and paste chorus one guitar - chorus - we're gonna have the same problem we're gonna have some disparity in terms of performance okay so what do you do in this situation when you don't have another take that you can just copy and paste from a different section of the song well typically the suggested option is what is known as the Haas effect the Haas effect is basically you duplicate the same exact performance but you adjust the timing so it's slightly different timing from the original performance let's just kind of examine this so a copy and paste okay so now let's throw the sample delay plug-in that's included in logic on this duplicated guitar track and we're gonna set some milliseconds and I'm just gonna start adjusting the timing as we listen okay so we're gonna push it back okay interesting we're getting more of a double effect now we hear the guitar is on the left and right because the right one has been pushed back 19 milliseconds which roughly like 15 that 23 24 milliseconds is that window for the Haas effect but I never find the Haas effect to be a good solution to the problem I never liked the result because to me it sounds a little Phase II because we're taking the same exact performance and pushing it back slightly in time so it's the same exact waveform you know I mean take a look at the waveform all that's happening now is that this part of the waveform you can see they're identical it's just slightly back so now there's some phase collisions and cancellations going on I prefer to add a little extra processing if I really have to do this if I can't pull a different take from a different part of the song if I can't find a different take in a take folder then I would add a couple other processors so let's dig into space designer a bring in space designer and I'm going to dig into the Warped effects and for this because we're working with a guitar let's use one of the amp cabs that are included in space designer this is an impulse response of an amp speaker okay so check it out let's now hear the two together okay slightly wider let's bypass and reintroduce it okay cool so now we're getting even a wider effect I mean space designer is a reverb plug-in so it's probably adjusting the timing but it's also an impulse response that was measured through a guitar amp so there's a tonal difference as well it's not just time now we're adding a variation in tonality okay so one other thing I want to throw on here let's throw on the overdrive plug-in and I'm gonna set this gentle you know like just about there and I'm gonna make sure that the tone is set to 20 okay here we go [Music] thanks to the overdrive plugin we're adding new harmonics I mean it's gentle we're not trying to crush this thing we're not trying to beat it to death with an overdrive but we're just adding a little new harmonic content to further differentiate the original region from this duplicate region so now let's bypass both of these and reintroduce them [Music] so now we have a much wider effect let's unsolo the regions just mute that guy and take a listen [Applause] okay so we're using space designer to adjust the tonality of this guitar so it's a little different from the first guitar and we're using overdrive for a little more harmonic information okay let's now focus on something like a vocal because you can't run a vocal necessarily through a speaker cab emulation so let's just take a quick listen to this chorus vocal here okay so let's duplicate this vocal and let's do the same thing while hardpan will throw the sample delay plug-in on here make some adjustments [Music] okay so you hear that there's a separation now the main vocal the original is on the left-hand side and it's kind of louder because again there's some phase collisions there's some frequencies that are getting boosted it's the same thing still so let's now introduce space designer go into the Warped effects we're gonna dig into analog circuits and I'm going to look at maybe the clean console emulation here we go okay I know that could drive you crazy but the point is is that space designer again it's probably adjusting the timing you might want to play with a sample delay after the fact but it's adding a new tonality this is an impulse response that was measured through a console okay so let's now instead of adding the overdrive plugin I have Decapitator here from soundtoys let's just switch from the emulation so we add the a model I'm gonna flip through these to see what sounds best to further differentiate this double track from the original [Music] and there we have it we are further differentiating the original vocal from the duplicate so in a nutshell I just really want to hammer home that if you duplicate a track and then you copy and paste that same exact region to the new track Lane yes you're technically doubling it but there's nothing that differentiates the duplicate from the original so you're just making the same vocal region louder we need to create variations so ideally you would track multiple takes of you singing of you performing and pulling one of those takes to use as the duplicate or double if we don't have that option then I would search other sections of the song that are playing the same exact part that I could hopefully copy and paste so you know course one guitar two course - and then chorus twos guitar - chorus one so we now have two different takes and if you don't have that option then you can use the Haas effect using the sample delay plug-in and playing around with the timing of the duplicate but I suggest further refining the duplicate was something like space designer that can change the tonality even so slightly and also use some overdrive or saturation plug-in to adjust the harmonic information just subtly to further separate these two I hope that was helpful for you if it was I highly suggest subscribing to the YouTube channel why Logic Pro rules or subscribing on the website itself why Logic Pro roars calm every week I'm posting new videos and you post new emails to help you get the most you can out of Apple's Logic Pro 10 thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 70,781

Keywords: Doubling Tracks - The Best Ways (And Worst Way) To Add That Doubled Track Feel, double-tracking, haas effect, sample delay, space designer, logic pro x, logic pro, why logic pro rules, vocals, guitars

Id: JvTBnZTmR_Y

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020