The Whitehalls

More vox

Jan 29, 2010 Know the Band
Posted by Neil Smith

I was out at the studio on Tuesday night to do more work on the backing vocals, now that Drew has finished lead vocals. B and I were able to get through five songs, to add to the two I’ve already done. Four to go, then we’ll all take a listen to what we have so far, decide what else needs to be recorded and push to get it all done.

One thing that was really interesting was to listen to the work that B had done on Drew’s vocals. It is no secret that everyone corrects pitch on pro recordings these days, and we’re no different. Usually you can’t hear the results, but what I heard on Tuesday sounded a bit… odd. After talking it through for a while, it turned out that the cause of the unusual nature of the edited vocals was in fact some extra heavy compression. Things sounded fine with either the compression or the pitch correction, but both together made for an unnatural effect. They are after all doing the same thing, smoothing out the track. Compression smooths the dynamics (volume) whilst auto-tune smooths the pitch. When it sounds too smooth, it sounds unnatural. The solution was to dial back the compression, and now it sounded terrific.

It was really enjoyable to work with B on the problem-solving process – I always learn such a huge amount whenever I’m working with him, and we’re incredibly lucky to have him at the helm of this project.