Does anyone actually SING bgvs anymore?!?

Wait a minute, I can see how you can create a harmony by retuning, and how that would be useful for harmonizing the lead or doubling the singer as a simple duet, but how do you change to a background arrangement. When did the background singers start to just sing the same words and arrangement/melody as the lead?

I really only love different voices. The same human voice, even double tracked, just doesn't have the magic of 2 or more people doing it together.

I guess it would work for situations where the words matched. Melodyne can do a lot of things with enough effort; but for a singer, they could get it done significantly quicker by simply tracking it (with better results IMO).

I am not savvy with Melodyne for this reason. I do not want to invest time down a path that will make me complacent with challenging myself.

Also with a "demo" this is less critical, so to the OP it may be more common than I realized.

I use humans for all background vocals and I use human voices for doubling (although I use Waves/Abbey Road Reel ADT sometimes for doubling).  Although I have no objection to Melodyne cloned voices, they do not sound the same as real voices—and obviously cloning locks you into doing nothing but exactly what the lead is doing.
 
I do use Melodyne to tweak voices, however, because it is more efficient than multiple takes, punching in, comping, etc.  (You have to be well-practiced in Melodyne, though, to make it sound natural.)
 
Note: I have an excellent female studio singer who can nail any weird harmony part I can write, so I am lucky.

Well and that explains why so much music that comes out of Nashville is so boring. 
 
I still find it way faster to just sing a harmony. And because I can sing in pitch, I myself have not even loaded Melodyne to my new DAW set up. I don't like the registration process so if I do need a small tweak I use V Vocal still.
 
I just bought a Harmonizer stomp box to use for my live show. It's a barrel of fun. It works great on a lot of songs for the chorus and accent harmony fills. You have to use it just so with taste.  I just might try it on a recording to see what happens. It was only $150 so a lot cheaper than the software versions. 
I set it up with a Y cable at the input so my dry Vocals are in one channel and the wet in another. The more expensive models have the routing built in. There is a guitar input I drive from that extra output you get on a Boss Tuner. The harmony changes with the guitar chords. You have to play cleanly for best results. But these harmonizer dedicated hardware boxes are the way to go as far as I'm concerned. No fuss no muss. And I notice it helps me sing in pitch better as the harmony parts are never are out of key. Some units auto tune your voice on the fly. 
 
http://www.ehx.com/products/voice-box
 
 
 

Nothing worse than tick perfect quantized backing vocals. I love when everyone's putting their own feel and timing into the harmonies, just listen to anything by Little Feat, some of those backing harmonies sound gloriously stoned and full of character.

Thinking of creating some voice that works for demos - and do with Waves Ultrapitch which has a 3 and 6 voice versions - just slide a voice to a harmony and alter formant, move in stereo fields and volume. Maybe do telephone type almost and just very lite touch of some harmonies with Ultrapitch, and try to cover with running an instrument doing vocal melody as well. Don't like the sound of my own voice.
 
The things that Queen did was fenomenal, but also revealed on a documentary how much time they spent on fixing that, it was days. I don't recall, but they mentioned if it was dozens of overdubs to get that sound, experimenting like crazy with each others voices to see what goes where in harmony. And then it was tapes...
 
Got this Sia album "1000 forms of fear" and where her voice is doubled, too many places, it doesn't sound nice. Not like ordinary double takes, which become fuller - but creates some artifacts which are not nice at all. Sounds a little bit like hired band live on cruising ship, with bad PA - kind of brittle vocal distortion - but just a fraction, but too much of that on the album. Here voice alone is good. Got a feeling this is some artificial dubbing, when so, or exciter gone bad.
 
It sounds a bit like I tried to use Waves Aphex Aural Exciter on a femail vocal I hired, but always felt it sounded crap - haven't figured that one out yet, but read it should be good so I have to learn how to use it properly. Another day in the lab...

I can see them doing that now.  All the music, to an old traditional country musician, sounds like the same producer and same "A team" session musicians on almost everything that is now sold as "country" music.  (Sorry I had to say that). 
 
I have Antares Harmony EVO and I've done a few songs using that to get harmonies.  But not many as it sounds too "perfect".
 
 

There are some who actually sing background (and everything else also).
 
This is a shameless plug,  but check out the vocal group my son is in.  You can see them in the current #1 movie in America... "Pitch Perfect 2" and #1 album on Billboard.
 
Yes, They sing their background vocals..
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNAkI8KMHMU
 
If you wonder about them doing "melodyne" go see them live!  They would love to see you.
 
 

Personally, I don't think any software solution is capable of introducing the subtle pitch & timing variations that are naturally captured when recording either a bunch of singers or overdubbing the same vocalist.

KeniI think they were "pulling your leg"... ;-)

Well...maybe they exaggerated a "bit"...but just the other day my cowriter was asked if he wanted to sing his bgvs or just "fly them in" from the choruses.  First time he had ever heard that before.  And he was recording his EP at the same studio that tracked Eric Church, Little Big Town, and other HUGE acts in town...
 

caminitic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o

That was so incredibly well done! Without the video, people unfamiliar with those songs would definitely hear that as one.

Someone didn't show up for the background singing and the engineer did it.  So the producer asked himself do I pay for a chorus of singers or for editing?  Gee, such hard choices.

Well I do them myself, but whether it could be called actually be called singing is another matter.
 
Melodyne is a fantastic tool though and I do use it for minor tweaking. Cheating ? Yeah, but I'm subtle with it so you can still tell that I couldn't call myself a real singer if my life depended on it.
 
Anyway, the way I see it is that just about all production is pretty much cheating really......
 

The harmonies and doubling on this album are all sung.  The first song (Fifteen Minutes of Fame) has harmonies, but #2 (Bambicide) has 25 voices on the chorus.  You can hear layered voices in the bridge of the last song (Track #14), about 2/3 of the way through.  Some of the chords have some very tight parts (like a C# and D together).
 
http://www.themightykonrad.com/