A Few Words On Double Tracking
Humans are strange creatures. They fall in love with sounds. They invent machines to capture those sounds. Then they invent other machines to make those sounds sound even better. Often by playing the exact same parts they just played.
What am I talking about?
The magic of Double Tracking!
It all started with Les Paul. Not the guitar—though, yes, also the guitar—but the man. He was a brilliant jazz guitarist who, sometime in the 1950s, decided one version of himself wasn’t enough. He rigged up some tape recorders, stacked one solo on top of another, and called it progress. His song “How High the Moon” with Mary Ford was basically the birth of track cloning.
Then came the Beatles. John Lennon, who could bend time with a scream but couldn’t stand singing the same line twice, needed a workaround. Enter Ken Townsend at Abbey Road, who invented Artificial Double Tracking (ADT) to appease him. Lennon used it on songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” where his voice floats through the mix like a ghost in a lava lamp.
George Martin might’ve called it production. Lennon called it magic. George Harrison probably just shrugged and smoked something.
Soon everyone wanted in.
Queen used it to build choirs out of three people in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Freddie Mercury’s voice, already mythic, became something otherworldly.
Randy Rhoads, on Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” double-tracked his guitar solos with machine-like accuracy and monk-like devotion.
Even Nirvana did it, reluctantly. Producer Butch Vig had to trick Kurt Cobain into double tracking his vocals on Nevermind, saying, “John Lennon did it.” Which, somewhat surprisingly, worked.
By the time Pro Tools came around, double tracking was less a technique and more a reflex. Why sing something once when you can do it four times and pan them across the galaxy? Listen to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” or just about anything by Blink-182—those aren’t harmonies, they’re echo chambers of adolescent angst.
Today, double tracking isn’t just common, it’s expected. It adds thickness, emotion, and the illusion of companionship. Two voices, almost the same, reminding you that perfection is boring, but slightly off? That’s beautiful.
That said, there is one major problem with the cloned track sound. It is extremely difficult to pull off a convincing version of it live.
Or at least, it was... Until this little beauty came around.
Anyway, that’s double tracking. It’s like cloning yourself for emotional impact. And sometimes, that’s exactly what a song needs.