Karaoke Forums

I heard no echo or anything in that nature when listened to a professionally recorded cd. I am wondering if anything were used to help the vocalist to sound that good (clear and the depth of the vocal). With a karaoke setup, it just doesn't sound good at all if I hear no echo, repeat or whatnot. I know most of us aren't pro, but we should be able to at least get close to that (assuming that we "can" sing. ).

That is the sign of a good engineer is when they can place the effect on vocals where you will barely notice them if you are listening, but if it weren't there - you'd say wth!
Every song pretty much in studio recording history have some kind of effect - whether it be on specific instruments and vocals or the overall recording itself. You really have to know what you are listening for in order to actually hear which effect is being used.

Can you give a couple song titles you didn't hear any effect at least to your ears.

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I can't name any I haven't heard effects on.
Some typical things done are:
take the original vocal track, duplicate it, adjust the time forward or backward a microsecond.
Add a single echo with a very tight time and short release
Reverb with several other of these
Flanger is big in grunge
Several different versions of harmonies
A huge thing with mid to late 70s bands was to come back and record followup vocal tracks to make their own form of effects\harmonies. Brad Delp of Boston was a master of this.

Recently heard Def Leppard and Heart together in concert and both used the exact same loop technology to add whatever they wanted when they wanted during a song. There are some pretty reasonable effects units out now that can do a similar thing.

The number and quality of the effects offered today that can be combined together however you want is quite astounding and can make a live performance seem as natural as day while in the background, all kinds of stuff is going on.

I've been SHOCKED at what was left behind when I've removed the vocals on several tracks.

Bryan Adams songs like cuts like a knife and run to you have the reverb sound i'm looking for.
Can't seem to copy it.

That is a very quick echo delay effect with the actual delay being routed into a small-medium room reverb. You would need to have two separate effect processors to achieve this sound.

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I can do it easily with my voice live rack. Where and how you route the echo can be set in the delay parameters. You would have to use the small room reverb in the reverb setup then just set how much (zero) is un effected vocals and how much you want to go through reverb.

...let me give you some extreme examples:

Cher "Do You Believe"/All T-Pain/50% of modern pop: Antares Autotune vocal effect (among others).

Prince "Purple Rain": HEAVY echo and delay

Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight": Heavy delay, doubling/echo

Slapback and Plate reverb (PHYSICAL reverb, not digital or even analog!) was on almost every vocal from the 1950s through the early 1960s.

The 1960s was the advent of digital effects, and pretty much all pschadelic songs through the 60s and 70s had multiple extreme vocal effects.

Almost all instruments obviously have effects on them these days, and always have since shortly after the Kinks and the Who popularized distortion (about 4 years before Jimi Hendrix came on the scene!

Effects are ALL OVER pretty much all music of the last 65 years!

I guess you just have to know what you're listening for Most karaoke hosts oversaturate vocals with gaudy reverb effects, but they certainly don't know what they are doing compared to sound engineers!

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C Mc
KJ, FL

Oooohhh I'm jealous now. I want one of those for when I sing in my band. Expensive! Are you happy with it?

I love it. I have the MP75 mic, which has a button that can either be used as a momentary or toggle. I used it for harmonies. Worked great until the mic button developed an issue. But the unit itself is off the chart! You have to really spend a lot of time with it to understand how you can chain things. But once you do, you can do anything with it. The EQ and compression leaves a little bit to be desired but I handle that at the mixer.

Wow! That's a lot of useful information . I've been very busy with work (and forgot my pw)! So sorry about not responding to some of the posts here. I noticed that, without any echo, delay or repeat, my voice (or my friends' voice, for that matter), didn't sound good at all. The trick is knowing how much to use those echo and special effects and I am just learning how to use it. But, not bad so far! Another question: I also bought 2 wired mics. One is EV and the other one is Sennheiser, and I had both the wired and the wireless mic connected through this echo machine, then to the Peavey mixer. I think the wired mics need a preamp, because I have to crank the mic volume all the way to max to match the sound (volume) from the wireless. Am I correct? For the moment, I don't know how to connect this echo unit to the mixer, so I can connect the mics to the mixer to use its built-in preamp. But a separate pre-amp is probably better than the built-in from the Peavey, is my guess.

Start by giving the make/model of the equipment.
Mixer, effects, mics, etc...

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So sorry about that! I uploaded all the equipment pictures in this forum somewhere. I will find that post and copy and paste it here.

Found it! Please refer to the post topic "How to properly adjust vocal effects?". You will see all the equipments that I have at the present time.

Not going to search the forum, put up a link to the thread please.

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No problem! Here it is:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28375
I forgot it's easy for me to view my own posts, but not for others.

you want another extreme example, listen to the song "Royals"

now I don't know if it is true or not, but someone told me that the whole song was done by one person *no backup singers*

with the harmony effort I played with by antares a couple of months ago, I could believe it.

-James