The Double Tracking Effect
Because it is impossible for a performer to sing or play the same part in exactly the same way twice, a recording and blending of two different performances of the same part will create a fuller, "chorused" effect with double tracking. But if one simply plays back two copies of the same performance in perfect sync, the two sound images become one and no double tracking effect is produced.
Townsend realised that, if two identical performances were played back with one of them slightly out of sync, the sound image would alter and widen, similarly to double tracking. There was no reliable way that this effect could be achieved by simply copying a vocal track on to another deck and then playing it back with the master slightly out of sync; at the time, there was no technique for synchronising two different tape machines. The end result would be that the second tape deck would gradually drift further and further from the first.
Read more about this topic: Automatic Double Tracking
Famous quotes containing the words double, tracking and/or effect:
“Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)