After all the gibberish on guitars, time for some singing! As said before, we’re combining recording guitar and singing to relieve a bit of the stress on the ones doing the singing. The ones doing the singing being three of us. It’s at times ,i believe, quite confusing for our producer Jimmy because we switch quite often from lead to back-up, to backing, to choir, to chant, to scream, it’s not easy keeping all the pro-tool-files in order…
But first things first, because there are about 6 or 7 possible ‘recording-booths’ in this studio, we started by running around the place, checking the specific acoustics and tone of each room, adding some damping material here and there, and finally coming to the conclusion that our first idea, to record the vocals from the guitar-booth, was the best one… time well spent!
Next step is trying out quite a lot of different mics and pre-amps. Sennheiser MD 421, 2 different MD 21′s, your obligatory SM 57 and 58 and some other stuff. Jimmy and myself did the blind test, recorded a song with each mic and pre-amp combination and chose our favorite (without me knowing which was which) and remarkably chose exactly the same combination. Off-course this is a choice you partly have to make with your gut because it might as well just been the best vocal-take…
Next is applying some compression and echo/delay to the vocals to have a better idea of what the vocals are going to sound like in the final mix. Purists may say ‘it’s not real if you add digital or even spring reverb to a vocal afterwards’ – but the fact of the matter is that in real life, not one sound you hear, be it car horns, sirens, dog’s barking, the neighborgs wife singing the sound of music, is ever really ‘dry’. The sounds bounce off of buildings, cars, walls, streets and some purists big forehead.. so in order to keep options open and record the vocals as well as possible ,we took the above approach.
By the time we finally had the right configuration set up in the right room and had everything up and running there was only time left to do 2 lead vocal lines. Still a lot of work to do, both guitar-wise and singing-wise, so i guess to main spotlight is on Jonas and myself for the moment…
… with the sound of music…
:: Jelle::
