colleen

This entire series was born because someone in the comments section of my Instagram asked me what pitched delay effect I was using on the vocals of “Winter Dawn”, so here goes.

On my album A flame my love, a frequency, I stopped doubletracking my vocals. On “Winter dawn”, I bussed the vocal track (via my DAW and physically via my Scarlett Focusrite18i20) to the Moogerfooger MF-104M and then sent its two outputs (mix out – which gives you the original signal mixed with whatever amount of delay you dial in with the mix pot on the pedal – and delay out – which gives you the delay only signal) back into the DAW on individual tracks. I kept the original vocal track centered, and panned the mix out and delay out tracks 50% on each side, with a tiny bit of Overloud’s Springage spring reverb emulation added to these.

Et voilà, three vocal tracks from just one single original take, with the added advantage that you can do this in two steps: first you record your vocals and tweak as needed, then you record the delayed parts, which means you are then free to play with the pots in real time to get some cool dynamic effects… such as toggling the short/long switch – my favorite thing to do on the MF-104M! I could literally do this all day!!! You can distinctly hear it here when the words become pitched either high or low, as well as on “Separating”, which uses the same recording setup.

A more subtle variation of this approach can be heard on “The stars vs creatures”, where I use the MIDIMuRF instead of the MF-104M to just filter the vocals slightly and again take advantage of the separate outputs that divide the filter’s frequencies in left and right channels, this time panning them at 25% on each side, and again keeping the original track in the centre.

I really hope that this vocals series has been somehow helpful or illuminating to some of you who like to hear about these things!

Amazing “Winter dawn” video by Connor Burke.

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