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expulsion of air on the plosive pushes the microphone s diaphragm against the casing of the mic, registering a slight, dull thud. There is a slightly longer, although courser, intake of breath before this salvation, again with a rough sibilance on salvation which contrasts with the smooth, languorous delivery of and desire. It s a beautiful sequence, astonishingly unmediated and intimate. Yet it showcases a number of elements which would ordinarily be removed in post-production. Recordist Jay Hodgson points out that as a sound engineer when you ve got a close-mic d vocal track, the very first thing you do before you do anything else is you go in and you cut out the breaths. But those touches remain on Dummy. Sometimes the vocals were not re-recorded after the State of Art sessions but, to preserve the feel of the original recording, the original demo takes were instead used for the final recording.169 Dave McDonald remembers that the spontaneity, the authenticity, of the vocal take was critical: There was a bit of a battle sometimes between me and Geoff about cleaning things up. I m very in the world of, that was it: that s the take and that s the take. And all those little noises and little things are part of it. Right down 169 Miller 1995. " 111 " DUMMY to sometimes I would lose battles like on Roads, right at the end on the masters that I have here you have Beth saying something like Oh, that s it. It s over. And I just said, we should always keep that. And she agreed with me but Geoff wanted to get rid of it so we got rid of it. So there s always been those little natural things and I think Beth was very much into that sort of being a country girl the sort of organic way really. So that s what we liked. The choice of microphone an AKG 414 contributed to the vocals particular sound: That was just our mic of choice. And also of budget, really, at that early stage. It was all we could really afford in State of Art & The 414 microphone has the C12 capsule in it which was when you see those old pictures of someone like Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra, when they re using an AKG C12 microphone it s exactly the same capsule so you kind of get the old sound & That was something I was deliberately seeking. I ve always liked the sound of old vocals. I grew up listening to old records. I love that intimacy. The vocals on Dummy are also highly compressed, which is to say that they are processed in a way that ensures that the dynamic range is collapsed: the volume of quieter elements is brought closer to that of the naturally louder elements. Andy Wright, a producer who worked on Massive Attack s Protection, describes a record with a compressed vocal as one with a lot of presence & you can hear all the breaths and all the nuance in the " 112 " R. J . WHEATON recording. Dave McDonald rhapsodizes the effect of the Teletronix LA-2A compressor on the album s vocals it just instantly changes them and brings them alive. Gibbons vocals were also subject to equalization, in particular boosting frequencies in the 1-kiloHertz range to deliver something like a Tannoy effect. Like you would hear in [public address systems in] old factories or in buildings or old train stations & You d hear it on like a Noël Coward record. It s the sound you can hear promi- nently on Numb and Pedestal a slightly artificial, processed sound, almost nasal. As Jay Hodgson points out, the frequencies in that range are below audible sibilance (s, ch, and t sounds) but above the boomy chest resonance area. The frequency boost in that area is utterly distinctive. As Dave McDonald describes the old records characterized by that sound: they almost sound like they re in your ear. And it just seemed to suit her voice, and that s what we always went with. The vocals were also fed through a Roland Space Echo delay unit the kind used to produce the vocal echo that characterizes many dub recordings. Dave McDonald cites the technique as one of my favorite things with such a beautiful sound to it, a technique that dated back [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |
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