How do I layer/harmonize my voice?

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nickp88

New member
Ok, So I want to cover "Silent Night", however I want to layer my voice like Enya does on her albums. If you listen to Enya's version of Silent Night, her voice is layered and harmonized A LOT. Can someone tell me how to layer my voice and produce this effect?

Search for "Oíche Chiúin" by Enya. She sings it in Gaelic, It's a very pretty song.
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Oíche Chiúin is Silent Night in Gaelic, btw.
 
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There was an amazing computer music producer masterclass video on layering vocals. I will try and find it i have it upstairs somewhere. Just basically doing a lot of takes and layering the best ones up and throwing a bit of ad lib in there
 
just get a copy of a choir version of the song and then record yourself singing each part. or i think antares does something that sounds like autotune but it basically harmonizes for you. i personally don't really like how it sounds though
 
Harmonizing means singing different notes to form chordes with your voice.

So I'm not seeing your question here...

You turn on your mic, you press record and you record whatever take you want first, and then go lower on whatever parts are harmonized and go higher aswell.

unless 'm just not understanding your question.
 
There are also a bunch of artificial harmonizers around, the most famous probably being the Eventide H3000 series. Since Enya probably can actually sing, it might be just her singing all the parts, as suggested...or a combination of artificial and actually sung parts.
 
as far as i know harmonizing requires the singer to be perfect. Enya can sing very well. If you cant, try using a harmonizing software like Eventide or there are vst that can generate choir sounds. But they cant generate exact words. If you're harmonizing by ur self you need to record the same line 100s of times. I think enya records them like 50-70 times.
 
Still_learning said:
Are you kidding me, 50-70 times? Thats insane I've done 30 before but Idk 50-70 sounds like overkill to me lol
Click to expand...

lol yea i know. You know the band Adimus or smthing? in their choirs they record Miriam stockleys voice more than 80 times and changed its pitch in small amounts to get that cool choir like effect. Check it out on you tube. Cool song.
 
I do this in melodyne... Great program. You can take your vocal part, and copy and paste individual pitches to any other pitch you want. So I can sing the lead melody, then copy each word/pitch in the main melody to a note that will harmonize nicely with it. I can then change the formants of each pitch up or down to make it sound more natural... It's pretty sweet stuff.

There might be other programs kinda like melodyne. I'm not really sure.

But obviously this is a produced harmonization. Like the other guys said, if you want 'real' harmonization, you just record your 4 part harmony or whatever, onto different tracks then work on layering it properly.

Layered harmonies can sound sick if they're done right.
 
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