FINNEAS Track Breakdown & Vocal Processing Technique Revealed

if somebody goes oh my god you got to use this it's the best i'm like well is it am i going to notice you know because i've been doing like the first mic we ever used was called at2020 which is what we did oceanize and a couple of other songs on it's like 80. [Music] so when we get to something like how it ends where did this start so let's break it down so we have this drum loop i think that's on a synth called of a uh it's either an m audio venom or it's a prophet x and i'm leaning toward it being an m audio venom um but anyway i have a couple of synths in my studio now that are i'm a big sort of advocate for not uh you know not buying a bunch of expensive gear you can make stuff with great stock plug-ins from logic or ableton um but i do find that it is inspiring once you've made hundreds of songs with those things to get something that you don't fully understand and that's brand new so the m audio venom is basically like a discontinued like toy synth that i got on ebay for some nominal amount of money and it had this it felt very kind of like disco-e to me and over top of that i layered a thing that i am fairly certain is a uh profit x patch which was this kind of [Music] that sounded like it's a synth patch but it sounded almost like sort of like seagulls or something [Music] and it conjures a completely different world to the one that you end up with yeah but but it really is under the whole song that really was the foundation of everything and over top of that i played sort of an organ patch which has no rhythm it's very soft but it's chordal and so it's the thing that has kind of a tonal chordal bass happening [Music] and so those chords alone probably were the the bass line for writing lyrics um which is kind of often the uh often the case for me what was the point of all of those migraines you can hear a little bit of the bleed of the drum in the headphones don't spend it my way i think there's also a track which is a farfisa plug-in which is very distorted um i love the sound of a here let me play a little louder this is buried really far down but that's what it sounds like when it's loud [Music] that's sitting below everything else um but all together that makes up this [Music] and when you do that vocal is that the finished vocal or is that uh do you just improvise words or do you write them out first great question on this song the first thing i did which got uh thrown away i don't think i could pull it up unfortunately um but i did one scratch take of a vocal while i was writing it i think i could be totally wrong i want to say it was like into a vocoder mic which is like a little crappy mic attached to a synth a synthesizer called a a um ultra nova by novation um and uh yeah i mean you know something to get the the sort of you know the melody lyric across without being precious about takes um if i pull up like the take list yeah there's about like 16 takes of that verse that i then comp together um and process and do a little tuning i've sort of never i've never really tuned billy's vocals because she's such a good singer but i have to tune mine all the time right right i'm not as not as good over top of that i layered some harmonies as the verse moved into the second half [Music] just a little octave up kept it really quiet a pointless time and how do you process your vocals then i do very little processing on the harmonies there's uh nothing they're completely dry um yeah there's nothing on the harmonies they're running uh in my studio through a cl 1b that sort of classic blue compressor unit that's probably somewhere in this room although i haven't seen it um but yeah the sort of like you know the the most standard uh compressor but that's a new thing for me also i used to use just the logic compressor plug-in but i uh i've started running it through that yeah and did do you have a favorite mic or do you always use the same microphone yeah i've spent a lot many years using a tlm-103 neumann microphone which is still what i have on the road so i still do a lot of recording on it uh i think that mike's awesome at home i have uh i use a chandler red on my own voice and on a lot of other people and then billy sings into a telefunken 251 at home which i think sounds awesome on her we sort of before we started making her second album and then my first album after that we did a whole sort of like we had some down time and did like real like shootouts microphone shootouts which we'd never done in our lives probably had the time and it was fun and that was the one that she thought sounded the most exciting on her voice and i liked the chandler red too so that was what we landed on yeah and great idea and great that you had the time to do that because that ends up saving time totally in the long run well and i also sort of again like maybe by accident and i've always been kind of a stickler for sort of not like i don't it's hard for me to believe the hype about things you know if somebody goes oh my god you got to use this it's the best i'm like well is it am i going to notice you know because i've been doing like the first mic we ever used was called at2020 which is what we did oceanize and a couple of other songs on it's like 80 and you know i always had a feeling of like mike sounds fine and it was like a little noisier than i like i don't like a high noise floor i can't really stand the shure sm7 microphone because even with a cloud lifter it's two layers too much like it just sounds like that and i like i like real silence in between words [Music]

Channel: Tape Notes Podcast

Views: 119,662

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Id: mVtFYM6JLOw

Length: 7min 9sec (429 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022