One way to approach this could be to use an alternate take of the lead vocal part as the source material for the new artificial/transposed harmony line. Now, certainly sometimes you might want this kind of superhuman harmony effect, but if you’re going for a more live feel, it would be desirable to have a little more of the normal human variation that always exists between performances, even if they come from the same performer.
Regardless of the particular type of pitch manipulation technology employed to alter the pitches of the source recording - the lead melody line that will be the raw material for the new harmony part - if the harmony part is an exact match in terms of dynamics, timing and phrasing for the lead, the result may be an unnaturally tight harmony rather than the more natural, loose pairing you’d get from a different performance. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to try to alleviate this kind of thing, and make artificially created harmony lines sound looser and more natural - this article will go over a few suggestions for “humanizing’ artificial harmonies. This might be the case when a vocal harmony or two is created by duplicating a lead vocal and then applying editing and/or pitch shifting techniques to create a new version of it that will serve as a suitable harmony line. However, just as with many artificial means of creating what would otherwise be live acoustic recordings (sampled instruments etc), the results can sometimes suffer from a somewhat stiff and overly mechanized quality. Of course, technology notwithstanding, the best approach to making harmonies is still probably to let a good singer record them, but there are plenty of reasons - often logistical and financial - why this may not always be possible, and so modern pitch technology is pressed into service.
One typical example of this is the ability to create vocal harmony parts long after the singer has wrapped up and gone home. Now that sophisticated pitch editing and manipulation features have become commonplace - most DAWs include this capability to some degree and there are plenty of third-party options - we tend to take for granted the ability to shape and massage vocals in ways that would have been unheard of years ago.
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