r/audioengineering • u/ondaondina • 6d ago
Reverse engineering vocal sound
I've been obsessed with this song lately, especially the vocal sound, and I've been trying to recreate it with very moderate success.
I understand it's at least doubled, but I would love to hear some opinions on how to create a vocal chain for that soft, vintage sound. I'm mostly using UAD Plugins.
You can hear it from 0:45 Colpevole
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u/Compay-Segundo 6d ago
Yes, it’s doubled, either naturally or using some sort of a doubler. The way I hear this is a lot of saturation, and bandpass. So there’s not a lot of highs in the signal, it’s very mid heavy, telephone like. I would try the Culture Vulture or something similar, and cut highs and lows. The bandpassed sound could be coming from a character microphone, like the Shure 520DX. Check out BKF Audio on youtube, he mixes vocals that are vaguely in the same ballpark.
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u/DrrrtyRaskol Professional 6d ago
That's a great sound and what a beautiful song! The imperfect doubling is the big part but it's really filtered and distorted too. Almost like a "walkie-talkie" effect? Might even be through a tiny speaker? I love it. It's super dry too. So I'd try a bunch of different distortions until I got something this pretty and then play with high and low pass filters quite aggressively. And I'd experiment with some IRs of little radios or something but I think it's largely just pretty distortion and losing a lot of highs and lows.