If the vocal track is a little weak, there are plenty of tricks in the book to beef them up a little. You are hardly the first sound engineer who has to come to the rescue of a weak singer (we won't name names here...), so there are plenty of known techniques to deal with it.
- The first thing to do is to check if the singer is in tune. Honestly, most singers sing out of tune, to varying degrees - ranging from barely noticeable and charming & acceptable to unbearable.
The good news is: GarageBand has built-in pitch correction. With a single slider control, you can fix a real audio track containing a vocal (or instrumental) melody line even if it was recorded out of tune. Really. Of course, this effect can't perform miracles, but the improvement in a vocal track can be quite dramatic.
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Double the vocal track Press Command-D to duplicate the track, and option-drag the region into the new track to copy it. You now need to do something with the duplicate to hear a difference. You can:
- Time-shift it a little. Uncheck "Snap to Grid" and move the copied vocal track just a little bit; a type of delay is the result
- Apply different effects (like reverb, or different amounts of reverb) to each track and pan them left and right.
- Make two duplicates. Apply chorus to each, pan them left and right but keep the original, without chorus, in the middle
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Boost the weaker part of the singer's frequency range with the AUParametricEqualizer (double-click the track to bring up the Track Info window. Audio Unit effects are in the pull down menus under the Details....triangle)
- Get the singer to sing the part several times. Now layer the tracks. This is by far the most common technique for pop vocals.
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