How to Layer Vocals Like a Pro: Techniques for Bigger, Fuller Mixes

Unless you’re working in the most raw and minimal acoustic genres, a very exciting element of music production is to treat the human voice as a production instrument in itself. You can take a vocal recording and use it for ethereal pads, vocal layering, EDM-style vocal chopping to create percussive elements and effects, and even create exciting sci-fi sounds a la Dune. Say hello to vocal layering,

If layering vocals and creating vocal effects sounds terrifying and you don’t know where to begin, don’t worry your little soul. It’s not as advanced as it sounds, and there are some brilliant vocal and effect plugins that will do the heavy lifting for you. If you’re working in pop, hip-hop, dance, EDM, or Bring Me The Horizon-esque rock production, there will be a vocal layering technique below that will take your vocal productions up several levels. Let’s amplify your voice. 

Stack it up: the classic unison stack

Let’s start with one of the most common but essential vocal layering techniques of any style or genre — the unison stack. If you’re recording vocals in a big mix with lots of instruments, effects, and elements to a beat, recording only a single pass of a vocal could leave the singer struggling to cut through and be heard in the track.

This is why it’s so common to use vocal layering by doubling the lead vocal melody line. In fact, in some of the bigger-sounding genres, the engineer might even request three or even more takes of the lead vocal line.

While it’s important you or your vocalist keep the vocal takes consistent, bear in mind that the inevitable and natural slight variations in pitch and timing are actually a good thing for achieving that full, human sound that you’re after. For this reason, sometimes a different vocalist entirely is paired for the layers, occasionally even a male and female singer for a full and varied sound. You can have them sing an octave apart if matching the same range is a problem.

Struggling to edit the takes together into a nice sync? Fear not; there are vocal plugins for this precise job, such as Synchro Arts Vocalign, to get everything lined up beautifully.

Turn your vocals into an angelic choir: layering vocal harmonies and background vox

Next up, it’s time to add harmonies and background vocals to the lead vocal line. Whether you’re looking for a traditional Joan Baez and Bob Dylan A and B harmony, or you want to go full Ariana Grande and create many layers of intricate vocal harmonies, simply record new lines running parallel with the lead vocal.

You can get super creative here and channel Imogen Heap by adding effects to your vocal layering — one idea being to keep the lead vocal clear, while adding extra effects to the harmonies, such as a vocoder, heavier autotune, higher levels of reverb, creative EQing, and more.

If music theory isn’t your bag, the most common harmonies to know are the third and fifth intervals related to the lead harmony. For example, if you picture playing a C Major chord on a piano, C is the first interval, E is the third, and G is the fifth interval. The harmonies can be layered above or below the lead, or both if it’s Beyoncé o’clock.

You can also be selective of when to add harmonies and when not to, for example, if there’s a really killer line in the lyrics you want to emphasise. Many pop songs will save the most dense vocal layering harmonies for the chorus, also.

Modern music also creates vocal layering with extra lines that don’t sync with the lead vocal melody. This is known as background vocals. Think ad libs, call and response, spoken or whispering fills, and more. It’s a hallmark of hip-hop that has seeped its way into pop and other genres, and is something you can get really creative with to achieve really full-sounding vocal stacks and layering.

Vocal ambience: layering vocal pads and atmospheres

Here’s a really fun vocal layering technique that is really creatively fulfilling — record your vocals to create lush cinematic pads and atmospheres. Or you can even use existing or discarded vocal takes to do this when the microphone has been put away.

The main port of call is to simply add a big, heavy reverb. A big delay will help do the job beautifully, too. A vocal pad can work stunningly, sitting in the background behind the main vocal lines, or for a mysterious song intro, outro, or it can fill in between a verse and chorus. The possibilities are as huge as the vocal pads themselves.

The key for both the reverb and delay is to reduce the dry signal of the vocals so that the reverb and delay dominate and create the pad effect. Vocal layering is brilliant here also — the more doubling and harmony layering you add, the more depth your vocal pad will have. Who needs an expensive synthesiser when you can just drown your vocals in reverb?

Giving vocal layering the chop

This time, we are channelling the patron saint of dubstep himself, Skrillex. One of the most glitchy and fun ways to approach vocal layering is using vocal chops. As the name violently suggests, you take a vocal recording and chop it up. You can take really short samples and create percussive elements from your vocals, even using them to double snares and hi-hats, or creating vocal drum fills.

There are two methods to go about this. There’s the manual approach, where you manually chop up the vocal snippet yourself: make sure you’re using the scissors tool within your DAW, and then start literally chopping up the stem to get different vocal chops.

If that sounds like a pain, you can use a sampler plugin, for example Ableton Simpler, load in a vocal recording, and then the sampler does the heavy lifting for you. From there, you can edit the trigger points and transients to get some satisfying chops. Either way, you can then start having fun with the chops by playing with the pitch and adding effects to get your desired result. No sharp knives required.

Getting granular for cinematic textures

A granular synthesiser is a stunning and limitless way to take your vocal stacks and create all manner of vocal processing, ranging from shimmering pads to glitchy fragments of the vocals.

Though it may sound complex, granular synthesis is a process that takes a piece of audio and breaks it up into tiny snippets, or grains, if you will. The results can be pleasingly futuristic and give big sci-fi vibes.

Some of the granular plugins to consider are Native Instruments Straylight, Inertia Systems Granulizer 2, and Ableton Granulator II. This is not limited to vocals — you can whack any audio source into one of these plugins. But vocal layering does sound particularly incredible with this application.

The sky’s the limit: get stuck into rearranging, stretching, playback direction, grain size, and pitching your new vocal grains and create your own synth using the human voice. Check out granular synthesis in action via the video below:

Using Vocals as a Rhythmic Sidechain

A relatively advanced technique involves using a vocal track as a sidechain source to create rhythmic movement in other elements of your mix. It’s another EDM and Skrillex-esque approach to proceedings.

By applying a compressor to a bassline or synth pad and sidechaining it to the vocal, the other element will duck in volume every time the vocal sounds, creating a pumping, rhythmic pulse that is directly linked to the singer's performance.

What is vocal layering, anyway?

Vocal layering is a music production technique that has become well-established and increasingly creative and complex. It involves recording multiple vocal performances to create a single, unified sound. It goes beyond a simple lead vocal by adding depth, thickness, and dimension to a mix. The most raw and basic example is double tracking — where you record the same vocal line twice. But other traditional techniques are adding harmonies, and ad-libs.

In more modern production, the term now incorporates processed textures such as vocal chopping and granular vocal synthesis. The primary goal of it all is to take a mere single human vocal line, and then make the vocals sound larger than life and fill out the space.

This is all dependent on the artist and genre. For example, an acoustic singer-songwriter might not want to go far beyond doubling and harmonies to lose the raw nature of the music, whereas a dance music singer might want to go as big as possible with vocal chops, loads of harmonies, and processed vocals.