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Yeah, without knowing exactly what settings they used in terms of the delay time and the decay factor, it’s hard to pin-point how to repeat it with Audacity. You may have better luck with the GVerb plug-in than the standard echo settings. Another tip that I’ve picked up from using Audacity over the years is that you’ll most likely want to have two duplicate vocal tracks, one without any effects and one with the extra echo/reverb added. That seems to work better than just using one vocal track and trying to apply occasional effects to it.

Mr. Kite said

PeterWeatherby said
Yeah, without knowing exactly what settings they used in terms of the delay time and the decay factor, it’s hard to pin-point how to repeat it with Audacity. You may have better luck with the GVerb plug-in than the standard echo settings. Another tip that I’ve picked up from using Audacity over the years is that you’ll most likely want to have two duplicate vocal tracks, one without any effects and one with the extra echo/reverb added. That seems to work better than just using one vocal track and trying to apply occasional effects to it.

That’s an interesting idea, I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll have to try that too.

What exactly is the difference?

When you apply echo and/or reverb to a vocal track, it loses some of its original clarity. It doesn’t sound like a clean vocal track anymore because it’s smothered in effects. If you can have a clean vocal track with a separate “effects” track, the original remains with all of its clarity and quality, while the effects are still there. It’s also nice to be able to mess around with the output levels on the effects track separately.

I use this technique with pretty much every vocal track I use, because I always want some degree of reverb on the track, but I don’t want it screwing up the quality of the original track. My technique is to simply duplicate (copy-paste) the original vocal track, add whatever effects I want, and then drop the output level on that effects track to 1 or 2 clicks below the “clean” vocal track.

After messing with the settings a bit, I’d say the delay time on that echo is about .25 seconds, and you’d want a fairly high decay as well, maybe .75 seconds to 1.25 seconds, somewhere in there.

Mr. Kite said
I have one more question though, I don’t usually put effects on my guitar, but if I did should I use that double track method, or would it not matter as guitar doesn’t need to be as clear as vocals?

That depends on the effects, I suppose. If I’m just doing a straight acoustic guitar track and I want to add a bit of reverb in Audacity, then yes, I’ll duplicate the track and add the effects there. But if I’m adding the effects via a processor or pedal prior to sending the signal into Audacity, I usually don’t bother double tracking and adding further effects with Audacity.