 So you're in your door like I am now and you want to spice up one of your instruments by making it sound wider and you've heard of this technique called doubling here which you can use on vocals guitar or anything you can think of and it's easy right you just take that instrument you make a duplicate you pan one copy to the left and one copy to the right job done well let's try that I'm in my door cakewalk at the moment but it doesn't matter which door you're using the principles are all the same and I've got this electric guitar which sounds like this currently okay so let's take that electric guitar I'm gonna right click here in cakewalk and go down to duplicate track okay done that and I'm just gonna make sure that I include events for the duplicate so that is the actual sound itself click on okay and that's done I've got my duplicate track now I'm gonna take one of those guitars and pan it to the left and the other one and pan it to the right job done right wrong hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will now some of you may have already have guessed that I actually just made that guitar sound louder not wider so it currently sounds like this when what I really want is for it to sound like this now the more experienced viewers amongst you will know exactly what I did wrong but stay tuned because there's still a couple of tips in this video which I think are going to be really helpful to you now let's talk about the three T's of doubling with the first one being timing so let me put you out of your misery what I actually should have done with that guitar part was record a separate performance if I'd recorded a separate performance then there will be slight differences in the timing between the two I'm not talking about musical mistakes but just human differences and when we hear those timing differences panned left and right things begin to sound much wider to us let me demonstrate here with this piano part okay I'm using this piano part because it's a MIDI instrument which means I can make the timing perfect between two performances by quantizing the first version which is here in the blue we've got the left and right channels okay this is quantized so the timing is perfect the second version in green here I didn't quantize it so there's slight differences in the timing I'm going to switch between the two so that you can hear the difference quite easily let's have a listen now with the first one as I say if we double click here and go into the piano roll if you look at the notes they're perfectly on the grid yeah exactly on the grid if we go to the second one which I didn't quantize here in the green if you look very closely some of these notes are either before or after the grid now with each performance there will be slight variations in that as well and it's that which really begins to help us with making our instruments sound wider now the downside for this piano in particular is there's no difference in pitch or my second T which is tuning so something that people have noticed when they're doing doubling is that if you do too much pitch correction on something like a vocal it's difficult to make it sound as wide so for the sake of the acronym I'm not talking about pitch but tuning okay now I've got a demonstration here you can see three tracks in pink here this is a vocal part and you can see three tracks in sort of yellowy green now the top three brings me to sort of a another little tip here when I'm doing vocals especially and I do doubling I actually keep my original and I keep that right in the middle then I do a duplicate performance for the left and a duplicate performance for the right okay so that's where you can see three rather than two and it doesn't just apply to vocals it could be other things now the first three that we can see here have no pitch correction on them okay so it's just the natural vocal the second three in yellow have fairly heavy pitch correction on them what you may call auto tuning now it's important to remember that these two are from the same performance from the vocal okay we've still got the timing differences so there's a little bit of width but listen to the difference between the two again starting off with the first one no pitch correction and then in yellow the second one pitch correction have a listen it almost sounded as if the life was sucked out of the vocals here for the one in yellow the one with the pitch correction if you couldn't really hear it very clearly with the music there let's just highlight these and solo all of those tracks so we'll just listen to the vocal by itself no music you should be able to hear it quite clearly now so it's important to remember when you're doing heavy pitch correction on vocals that it's possible that you may lose some width and that's because again our ears can hear the slight difference in that pitch and it makes it sound wider now it's not just for vocals it'll happen with things like guitars you know not because your guitars out of tune but there are slight tuning differences every time you play different pressures on the string for example will have you know a difference a slight difference in pitch now as I say this is a little bit more difficult when you're using MIDI or virtual instruments where the pitch is always absolutely perfect something to be aware of now the last thing that we're going to talk about the third T is tone so we're back to my original guitar demo and I've implemented all the things we've talked about and it's sounding like this now as I say I've got three guitars actually they're one for the center and one for the left and one for the right and of course they're all separate performances so we've got natural timing and tuning or pitch differences now the other thing I've done with the left and right channels is make some adjustments to the tone using EQ so if we look at the first guitar over here this is the left hand guitar I'll open up it's EQ here now it doesn't matter of course which EQ you use I happen to be using fab filter here but you can use whatever one you like I'll pin that one and I'll move it over to the left side here so that we can see it's the left hand EQ and then I'll open up the EQ for the right guitar over here you can see they're sort of similar on the face of it but there's some major differences the one on the left over here I've done a little bit of a reduction here and around about one and a half K okay it's a 3 dB reduction and I've done a boost around about 5k a really big boost actually in this case 6 dB now it doesn't matter what you do in terms of which frequencies or kind of how much that's up to you it's up to your personal taste now on the right hand side I've made adjustments at the same frequencies but where I've done a boost I do a cut and when when I've done a cut on this side I do a boost so in other words at one and a half K also a little bit higher actually in this one I've done a 3 dB boost where I did a cut over here and then around about 5k or a little less than 5k I've done a pretty big reduction 6 dB there whereas I did a boost of 6 dB over here again our ears can hear those differences and it makes things sound just a little bit wider it's a little bit more subtle in this case but it definitely works and that's how we're getting that nice wide guitar sound now you don't actually have to go to the trouble a lot of the time of recording a separate performance for your doubling because normally let's face it during the process of recording you create lots of takes now if you're mindful of this and keep some of those takes as long as there's not any terrible mistakes in them then they're often very useful for creating your tracks for doubling now one of the things we do in the recording process which creates natural duplicate performance is vocal comping or any kind of comping in fact now if you're a cakewalk user and you're interested in doing some comping I have made a video about that and you can watch that right here it's an awesome way to get the best part of all of your performances and blend them in together for a perfect take