The biggest thing for me was to have worked with a great vocalist. Before that I used to think vocal tracks required tons of work to make sound right.. But like Gary says, if you have a vocalist that'll give you great performances, that really cuts down on the amount of massaging and coercing and morphing you have to do after the recording is done. Provided you have good communication with the vocalist, and the performance (direction) is mapped out well, the technological magic is pretty minimal. I mean, with a great vocalist, time is better spent on directing the performance anyway. Much better bang for the buck there.
Now if you end up with a mediocre performance.. or even a poor performance.. that's when you have to bust out your technological arsenal and see what you can salvage. I mean, at the end of the day you have to make do with what you have right. And you gotta make it happen anyway. And I hate it when I'm in that situation. So the solution is to solve it at the source. Pick the right performer. It's the same as with any other instrument.
The biggest problem for me are vocalists who don't have a consistent voice. Like people who can mimic a bunch of different vocalists, but don't really have one of their own. And so every take it's somewhat different.. they go loud, they go soft, narrow, wide.. and there is no continuity between any of the sections in the song... There is no technology that will fix that. That's just a problem of artistic maturity. The times I got vocalists like this, I spent some time, helping them find their voice, or at least bring it up (quite enthusiastically) that they should think about it, if they were serious at all about a career as a vocalist.. and then continue on with the recording. It still makes me upset just thinking about it. I remember a guy who literally told me he could sound like Mariah Carey. That made so little sense to me that my brain went into a state of shock. Yeah yeah yeah man, that's really nice.
Nestor wrote:Speaking like that, all seems to be easy Gary, and it probably is. It must be me… because every time I have to pilot voices for important songs, I don’t really distinguish in full clarity what should I do exactly by the end. I tend to dislike something which is almost impossible to change, and is a subtle edge, certain harshness, in the timbre of the singer.
You have made me wander………, and I now think my problem is, in fact, in the “recording process”, and not in the way I treat voices.
I have recorded instruments all my life, and they sound pretty good and will get in any project like a good take, but I haven’t had much experience recording and treating voices. Perhaps, I got it a little bit for granted, and should learn more about it.
