breathy, whispery vocals over LOUD guitars, how?

[JGriffin]

i've heard so many stories of them reducing monitor engineers to tears on tour because they'd always be wanting more vox in the monitors, but meanwhile they're barely opening their mouths to sing and the guitars are all at 159db the whole time.

Gawd, I hate working with guys like that. I play with one guy who sings really quietly and sometimes backs up 3-4 feet away from the mic, and needs more monitor than anyone I've ever heard. Ring city.

In-Ear-Monitors... they're your friend...

Oh man, if clubs in this town were equipped to deal with in-ear monitors...

[Galen Ulrich Elfert]

Find the essential EQ point of the vocal and Cut it on everything else.

The frequencies that seem to be most critical for intelligibility of speech (and that means singing too) are the upper formants in the 2-6kHz range. If you can keep this fairly clear you should be a long way there.

Galen

[SpencerBenjamin]

A little trick I sometimes try is singing a part normally, then double tracking that vocal with a whispered version. I don't know if any of the shoegazers did that particularly, but it can sound pretty cool sometimes.

[chris harris]

I saw MBV in Chicago last year at Aragon Ballroom and the vocals sounded great. Drums sounded like shit for part of the show, though.

[Gentleman Jim]

noeqplease wrote:

In-Ear-Monitors... they're your friend...

If you've ever seen the look on a singer's face when they keep asking to have the in-ear's turned up until they move their head and feedback nearly kills them, you know that in-ear's can go from friend to mortal enemy in about 2 seconds flat.

Seen it, and it's not pretty. Let's be careful out there, folks.

[Rex Reason]

Listening to those Loveless tracks the vocals aren't exactly up in your face and the lyrics are very hard to decipher. But the vocals are just another texture in the overall fabric of the tunes and, though they are a little obscure and a little buried they work really well that way.

But I think the critical element that hasn't been mentioned yet is the quality of the melodies on the album. They have a very ethereal element to them that would make them seem "whispy" even if, as was suggested earlier, they were sung more loudly.

-RR

[ashcat_lt]

A little trick I sometimes try is singing a part normally, then double tracking that vocal with a whispered version. I don't know if any of the shoegazers did that particularly, but it can sound pretty cool sometimes.

I don't know about shoegazers either, but this is a trick Robert Smith uses all the time to great effect. I keep meaning to try it...

[Brett Siler]

Yeah that is a great tip. The trick is to mix it in really low to where you can't really hear an out right whispering track on the song (maybe if you listened real close) but just one really big sounding vocal. Try it out, have the two mixed together, then mute the whisper, there should be a pretty significant difference.

[these_go211]

more great suggestions. nice! and i especially love the tip about finding the essential EQ point of the vocal and cut it on everything else. thanks drumsound!

and the one track normal vocal one track whispered sounds like a great idea as well. thanks again folks!

[SpencerBenjamin]

A little trick I sometimes try is singing a part normally, then double tracking that vocal with a whispered version. I don't know if any of the shoegazers did that particularly, but it can sound pretty cool sometimes.

I don't know about shoegazers either, but this is a trick Robert Smith uses all the time to great effect. I keep meaning to try it...

Mmm... you think that maybe he did that on Lullaby and then they forgot to mix in the normal vocal?

[Mikey P]

I don't know much about how the JAMC or BRMC recorded, but I've read a bit about MBV, especially Loveless.

I read, I think in the 33 1/3 book on Loveless, that the vocals and the guitars were the opposite of what most people thought.

That is, there were typically only a couple of guitar tracks, and they had no or little reverb on them apart from the backwards reverb Shields uses to wipe out the attack on the woozy guitar tracks. (I think he cheats a bit when he says this though, because there were often multi-layered resampled guitars played as keyboard tracks. So sure there were only a couple of 'guitar' tracks, but there might be a lot more guitar sounds going on than that.)

But there were a lot of vocal tracks. Shields said a couple of things in different places about the vox. One thing I read said that he'd write words and sing them but he wouldn't tell Belinda what the words were, so she'd make up words that sounded like what he was singing.

And that in the end he just used the good bits of all the vocal tracks at once. Each of them was sung at moderate volume, but they both avoid projecting their voices a lot of the time. It gives the vocals a kind of introjected feeling, like the singer is singing to themselves almost, rather than projecting to an arena.

Other things: there's hardly any panning in MBV records. Most stuff is panned to the centre. There's hardly any reverb on anything. Those two things give the records that sense of claustrophobia and too-closeness that sits alongside the druggy oceanic feel.

What most bands achieve with reverb, especially the bands inspired by MBV, is a blurring of the boundaries of a sound. Reverb smears a sound in time by overlaying it with quieter delayed copies of itself, either bouncing off the walls of a chamber or passed through a spring or plate or digital process. MBV blur the boundaries of their sounds, at least partly, by smearing their pitch dimensions rather than their temporal dimensions. That is, they overlay a couple of guitars that are being played with the whammy-bar, often with open tunings.

Through it all, Shields says he was trying to do the opposite of ordinary production. Ordinary production aims for presence, and for clearly defined sounds that occupy defined niches in the stereo field and frequency range. Shields was aiming for a kind of absent sound, and for sounds to bleed and smear into each other.