Member Since: 11/21/2010
Posts: 15,739
|
Quote:
Orton: “Lana’s records are all about her incredible vocals, so a great deal of time was spent finding just the right way to frame them. The vocal needed to soar in the choruses coming out of the verses. They were already quite wet in the verses, so I had to find a way that helped the record shift gear without becoming too saturated. The solution was a filter in the verses, as well as layering reverbs and delays together to change the texture and triggering some effects to catch particular words and phrases more than others. This worked particularly well because certain effects were included as part of the multitrack — for instance a reverb plate that Lana particularly liked when she was tracking. Altogether they contributed to the build up of layers.
“The vocal on Shades of Cool came in as a single vocal on just one track. One of the first things I did was separate it onto separate tracks for the verses and choruses so I could treat them differently. The verses required much more careful control over the lower frequencies than the chorus, so I used a Waves C4 multi-band compressor to catch any unwanted low frequencies. I set it carefully to react in such a way that it didn’t spoil the wonderfully rich tone of Lana’s vocals, something that can be difficult to do with EQ alone. The filter effect I used on the vocals in the verses came from the McDSP Futzbox. When the filter comes off for the chorus, the vocals open right up and that contributes to the soaring effect that’s so important for the song.
1 “As I mentioned, the vocal effects in all songs I mixed were often built up in layers and this was true for Shades of Cool as well. I used a Tel-Rey delay going into a reverb, which comes in on the vocal on the choruses. I actually have two aux returns, set to the same input, each with a separate Tel-Rey with slightly different settings. I panned one of the auxes hard left and the other hard right which gives a much wider stereo effect and leaves more space in the centre for the vocal. Then, as you turn up the effect, it doesn’t swamp the vocal and wash it out.
“On the drums I used some parallel processing on both the kick and the snare. The kick has some distortion added to it, using Lo-Fi, but adding distortion can have a tendency to take away bottom end, so on a parallel path I’ve blended an undistorted signal, with a LPF just to reintroduce the bottom end I wanted to hear. The snare also has parallel processing that comes in on the bridge, where it needed a bit of help. I set up various parallel paths, one adds some lower frequencies for a bit of extra thud and another has some SSL compression for a snappier transient. I treated the overhead differently in the bridge too, with stronger compression to create more excitement. I used the Waves CLA-76 for this, which I love because it adds so much character to the sound.
2 “On the bass I had a UAD Fatso Sr with the ‘Tranny’ option selected. This is really cool for boosting lower frequencies so you can also hear them on small speakers, whereas they’d normally be impossible to hear. I have a hardware Fatso Jr, which I love, but I find myself using it less than I used to as the UAD plug-in sounds so great and also gives you more control over how the ‘Tranny’ settings take hold.
“The guitars on Shades of Cool all had great and interesting sounds, so they didn’t need a lot of work. Nearly all of the processing I did was because I was trying to either make space for them or get them to support the vocal more. One of the guitars had some distracting noise on it, so I used Waves Z-Noise to extract a portion of the noise and minimise it. I tweaked the tone of the guitar that plays though the whole track, using Avid’s Eleven plug-in, because it had some peaky frequencies in it that I felt rubbed against the vocal. The re-amp plug-in did a better job of maintaining the character of the sound than simply EQ-ing would have done. On the wah-guitar that plays in the choruses, I used the UAD Studer A-800 to add some saturation which smoothes out the edges and makes the sound fatter. All of these things helped to create more space for the vocal.
3 “Finally, there were many Mellotron keyboards on this record, often in mono. I’m a big fan of carefully panning mono sounds to create an exciting stereo image, rather than having a lot of pseudo-stereo sounds which tend to sound less wide when you add a lot of them together. But, in this instance, there was an important Mellotron sound that was mono and I wanted to be able to mix it quite loud whilst not drawing attention away from the vocal. So, I used a UAD MXR plug-in with the doubler button selected to turn the Mellotron into a wide stereo signal and keep the centre of the mix clear for the vocal.”
|
.
|
|
|
|
