Best way to PAN VOCAL harmonies?

This reply is going to cause you grief, but…

That depends entirely on what you want it to sound like.

Just splitting it into two and panning one hard left and one hard right is exactly the same thing as panning a single mono track dead center.

The effect you might imagine getting can probably be best achieved either by singing the line twice, and the panning those hard left and hard right, or by giving one side of the split mono a couple samples delay.

spheric is right, it all depends on the sound you are after. If you want a pure, organic sound (folk, pop) try just panning the harmony to the left or right. Also try routing both vocals through the same compression and reverb to blend them nicely, and also EQ them so they have their own space (usually keep the main vocal EQ where it is, but trim or boost key the harmony frequencies so they blend well with the main vocal, and roll off its highs and lows more).

You'll get a real rich sound if you double track the main vocal and the harmony part, and spread them out a little in the stereo field.

If you have some favorite tunes that treat vocal harmonies in the way you want, listen to the tune closely with headphones and try to guess what they are doing, then try to replicate....

The best way to learn is to listen, not read.

Listen to country artists up on iTunes (lots of two part harmony), pop stuff (more two part), etc.

Listen to what people are doing.

Then of course, do what sounds good to you!

Sometimes you'll hear the harmony dead center with the lead, sometimes just slightly off left or right from the lead....

No rules.

TH

On the mixing end, you can learn quite a bit by selecting the preset channel strip settings in Logic (in your vocal channel strip, select Setting, then Voice, then select one of the choices). You will end up with a bunch of vocal-related plug-ins (eg eq, compression, etc) in the channel strip. Check out what is being done to your recorded vocal with these, and play with the settings.

On the recording end, if you google "recording vocals" or similar you will find a ton of useful info online (blogs, magazine articles, forums, etc) regarding microphones, mic usage, room treatments, hardware pretreatment (like mic preamps, compressors, eq, etc). Plenty of free stuff, no need to buy.

BUT start with the best microphone and interface (with great mic preamp(s) that you can afford. And get a windscreen. You gotta get a good rich clean audio recording before you even think about plug-ins and mixing. Can't stress this enough....

Have fun!

This is a great topic. I have been experimenting and pulling my hair out with vocal mixes for a long while. One thing is for sure -- dingdangdawg is 100% on the money. If you have a so so recording (bad miking/bad preamp) it's never going to sound good, no matter how hard to try to work it in Logic. The best vocal results that I have gotten have started with good, solid files, doubled, and spot tuned in Melodyne just to get rid of the big oops moments if there are any.

The one thing I can contribute that might help is that I have found that Send FX bussing with vocals works really well. For females, for example, I usually have 5 sends working with guitar amp pro, telephone filter eq, stereo delay, reverb, and a bus compressor (Usually the Fairchild from UAudio) That way you have really good control of the subtle amounts of each that you want to pull into the mix. Send FX give you a much more transparent effect in the mix (at least for me) and help the lead vocal sit nicely on top of the track without sticking out too much.

Anyway, just thought I would weigh in. Hope you find that killer sound and keeping listening to guys like dawg who actually know what they're talking about. 🙂