Two questions, layering audio and certain effect :)

Hello again, my fellow audacitors, I was mixing my song the other day and my friend told me that it is beneficial to stack 3 of my vocal tracks together to create a layering and more full sound. Is this true? What he means is I have a track with my vocals and I copy and paste it two more times to have 3 vocal tracks. Would that bring me a fuller sound?

Also, in this song, the second person’s verse at 2:35, how does he get that vocal effect of almost sounding slightly echoey, slightly more “broadcasted”, and I might be going out of the common audio jargon here, but angelic in a way?

thanks in advance Audacitors :slight_smile:

In itself, no, it will just make it louder (and probably distort if the addition makes it too loud).
However, if you stack multiple copies but have them start at slightly different times (use the Time Shift tool to drag each copy a little to the left of right), then you can create an echo or “delay” effect. A “delay” effect is just a very short echo, and can be used to “thicken” the sound. You would probably need to reduce the volume of the copies to make it sound right.

A simpler way to create a delay effect, is to use the “Delay” effect from the Effect menu.

Note that if the delay is too short it can create a slightly weird, and often not very pleasant, “phasing” effect.

Another alternative is to record yourself several times singing the same thing so as to build up an ensemble (choir) type sound.

Just guessing since I’ve not heard the song, but possibly a combination of delay and reverb, possibly with a bit of “chorus” effect.

Hey Steve, thanks for the reply, what exactly is the reverb effect? I read over it on the audacity page and the wikis but I’m not completely getting it.

It’s a bit like an echo effect, but rather than producing distinct echoes it produces “reverberation”.
For example, if you clap your hands once in a tiled bathroom, you don’t hear "clap clap clap
what you hear is more of a “zing” (ringing) after the clap - that “zing” is called “reverberation”. It is the effect of sound bouncing off the hard surfaces, like an echo but much faster.
Large empty rooms tend to be more “reverberant” than small rooms full of soft furnishings.

When recording, it is near to impossible to remove echoes and reverberation from the recording, so recording studios will usually have rooms that are acoustically treated to prevent the sound from bouncing around. The problem with that is that it can make the recording sound “dry” and lifeless, so a common technique is to add reverberation back into the recording artificially with a “reverb” effect. This allows the recording engineer to simulate the effect of playing in different types of spaces. For example, applying “Cathedral reverb” to a vocal track will make the voice sound similar to if the voice has been recorded in a cathedral.

There is additional information about reverb in the manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/reverb.html
A good way to test the effect is to generate a click track into a stereo track, and then apply reverb to it.