How to Sound Like Lizzy McAlpine

okay you guys hello welcome to another video Lizzie McAlpine has absolutely exploded onto the scene within the last like two or 3 years and she's probably one of if not the most requested artists in this Recreation Series so you guys know the deal by now let's analyze all the different sort of Clues and media hints that we can get on her Vlogs on her social media posts on any interviews that we can find in order to gather as much Technical and production info as we can and then we will recreate ceilings as accurately as possible and with less expensive equipment in a bedroom now lucky for us Lizzy McAlpine started off doing YouTube so we have some Vlogs that we can look at those of you wondering how we got the drum sound that's me so the snare on ceilings is just fingers on a snare sounds like with the uh with the beads off so we do know that there are Tom on ceilings and I don't know if this is the exact micing situation for ceilings but that is a AKG c414 and that's like an original one so it's amazing sounding I think it's got the original C12 capsule in it if you know what that is so when thinking about miking the toms I'm going to potentially use a 414 all right so now we are watching a video by the tape notes podcast where uh Bill and Lizzy break down ceilings and go into the actual doll the titles of these tracks are fingers nuts bamboo and rocks so Phil and Lizzy made a snare Sound by combining a bunch of samples that they recorded just around the house yeah so this is the sound of the three of us sitting in a circle around a snare drum with the snares off uh tapping our fingers in sort of like a ah the snare was off I was right yeah so we combine the fingers and the knots and uh that sounds like [Music] piss if you look at this big drum sound it looks like they might have five different microphones miking one drum now that's not a kick as far as I understand that might be some literal big orchestral drum I might do something like we did in the hoser video where we mic a Tom that's low tuned and then put that behind a kick sample which I actually see here they are also using a kick sample there's the sound of me playing like a a brush like a drumming brush just against my hand drum brush percussion kind of got this like squishy like there's the sound of the the brush hitting the hand and then the the sound of the sweat releasing the brush so as a quick summary for the percussion section we're going to use a combination of a bunch of different samples in order to create an interesting sort of snare sound we're then going to record percussion sounds using a floor tom and probably an open bass drum and we're going to record them from at least two different angles One microphone close and one microphone far ideally the close microphone is an AKG c414 or some equivalent and then we're going to reinforce these hits using a kick sample and then finally We'll add a brush just playing eighth notes for more subdivision hey so if you made it this far into the video would you mind dropping like a like and a subscribe just all the things that help YouTube understand uh that this is a video worth promoting I've been fortunate enough to have these videos do well and it is partially because of user engagement all the sort of backend stuff that YouTube uses as metadata anyways thank you so much and back to the vid is is here [Music] I think that's a Martin guitar and that is a another c414 what's nice about the 414 is there's an option on it where you can make it into a figure of eight polar pattern what that basically means is you can pick up from both sides of the microphone what's behind it and what's in front of it or in this case what's 90° perpendicular to Lizzy in both directions the other microphone is a small diaphragm condenser it's a nyman km184 now that microphone is pointed looks like roughly at the 12th fret which is normally about where I would put it to it gets off axis from the sound hole it's a little less boomy now the reason that you might want to use a midside technique over like a regular stereo micing technique is because of what you can do with that figure of eight style microphone you can actually duplicate that figure of eight microphone and do something called reversing the phase it basically takes the waveform and flips it upside down then you can take those two copies of the figure of eight microphone hard pan one to the left hard pan P one to the right keep the regular microphone in the center and get this massive wide Acoustic sound out of one acoustic record wrong he's wrong that version of me is wrong I'm right okay a lot of the things I just went over were incorrect they must have applied to other songs cuz I have the right information for ceilings the clip that I was reacting to where I found out the percussion information on ceilings that's part of a larger clip they have a patreon so if you want to get uh like as much in-depth information as possible about how they make ceilings how Phil and how Lizzy approach production in general not to mention so many other artists like Phineas I saw Royal Blood go check out the tape notes podcast it's an incredibly valuable resource uh and I'm not going to give all the information away that would not be fair to John Kennedy the person who hosts it but here's what we need to know before I was thinking that the main guitar might be midside this is false the real guitar is actually much more interesting it's an old Yamaha that Phil owns apparently it was kind of broken Beyond repair so he put electric guitar strings on it when strummed really lightly this gives a kind of Airy sound to it it almost sounds more like I think Phil said a harpsicord than an actual guitar it's kind of washy and bright that guitar is double tracked on the left and the right there's one more guitar this guitar is being felt with a halftime Rhythm there's more percussion it's miked more traditionally and I I believe it's a double 07 Martin according to Phil's memory based off of their very blurry screen recording it looks like there are two different microphones on this Martin one of which is marked side this could mean midside it could just mean one microphone to the side of the guitar we'll have to do some experimenting on top of that there are two other guitar tones a baritone electric doubling some of the string Arrangement and then a DI acoustic guitar sound which is kind of a bit trashy and it almost sounds like an electric that I believe is during the buildup into the outro okay so this has literally nothing to do with production I just saw this while searching through lizz's videos and and kind of thought it was surreal she studied where I studied like a year before I was there I've recorded people in this I've recorded a video guys in this rehearsal space like dude I've have videos I'll put a video up right now where I made an EDM track in this studio [Music] I sat in like did an essay in that little cubby thing this is weird man this is weird looks like they're going into a universal audio x8p or an X8 I'm filming I cannot talk oh nice oh wait here hold on this is my merch plug my parents who are wearing my merch merch everyone go buy my merch it looks great on them so it'll look great on you now there's one other really important piece of information I thought this might have been some sort of Telefunken microphone especially because that's what's in a lot of the found footage according to the tape notes podcast that is not the case what we have here are two unnamed u47 copies one for the first verse one for the second verse but the good news here we're going to use the tried and true L Clarion cuz that gives us a very nyman esque sound and then Phil also mentions this very small but important sentence multiple sets of gentle squashing with heavy dsing for Lizzy's voice I think that's enough information to get started there is one kind of big if whenever it comes to this song and that's whether or not we're going to use midi strings or we're actually going to bring in a string player anyways let's get started so it's been several weeks and the track is done so let's see what I did in a bedroom Studio to try and match what they did on the actual record now we'll be mixing these on Cali audio i5s I use these every single day they're my Workforce monitors that I've used on pretty much every single project since I've got them and they are also the sponsor of today's video they have three different speakers inside of them as opposed to the normal two and that Tweeter for the treble is nestled inside of the mid-range speaker which has a few benefits not only does the this make a ridiculously neutral frequency response but like spatially you can like point to where things are in the stereo field it is just ridiculously accurate at spatial Imaging I also just sound like better than every 8 in monitor that I've ever heard and they're 5 in so we'll be mixing on those I have some 9 to 42 electric guitar strings I hope I don't break my instrument I don't think you can right you can you can't break your guitar by putting lighter strings on it right so the very first thing I did was take my tailor which is already a pretty bright acoustic and put electric guitar strings on them for anyone curious this is a wild tone that I've never tried before wow that is really [Music] bright it's really really fun to play with actually because suddenly you're acoustic kind of plays like an electric you lose all kinds of bottom end and bass in the instrument but the trade-off is you get this kind of wispy washy Acoustic sound that kind [Music] of okay well sounds like its own thing it doesn't really sound like an acoustic or [Music] electric I did my best to emulate Lizzy's feel with her strumming then I played that whole part twice panning one to the left and and one to the right so here's the sound of those guitars mixed and [Music] unmixed then around the center of the stereo image I used my Gibson j45 and it fulfills the role of that darker Martin that Phil had mentioned before so this guitar is felt with a halftime feel so it has kind of a different emphasis on different notes as compared to the Taylor did now I did experiment with a midside recording technique for this guitar but I actually found that using an Austrian audio oc818 around the 12th fret and a senheiser MK4 on the very side of the acoustic near the end of the body that got me more of the tone I was looking for and by the way I'm going to leave some microphones on screen that are cheaper and have similar tonal voicings as some of these other mics that I'm using cuz I understand not everyone can afford this level of microphone now the reason I put that MK4 on the side is because the closer you get to the edge of the body the larger part of the body you're actually going to get a darker Tone If you blend that with the more traditional tone that you'll get at the 12th fret you kind of get the darker balance that I was looking for here's that tone mixed and unmixed [Music] and that tone combined with the [Music] tailor now there were a couple other guitars that showed up in this track primarily a baritone electric guitar that's kind of playing a Counterpoint Melody to the strings and a di acoustic that's run through a ratty guitar amp so here's what I did for those the DI acoustic was fairly straightforward I took the DI output of my j45 ran it through my Fender Deluxe Reverb tone master and then just used an sm57 at the center of the speaker cone to get this sort of pseudo electric sound I then double tracked that tone [Music] now the baritone is a little bit more interesting and it uses more DIY hacks that I think will be useful for you because I got this um I mean people who watch the channel know where I'm going I got this babat tennis racket string D vibrator it's called a Vibra kill and if you've seen the Phoebe Bridges video you you already know about this even though it's meant for a tennis racket it has six slots so you can put it like that and it gives you this sort of rubber Bridge sound which is a really really in demand sound right now but rather than being a permanent modification to your guitar it's an $11 thing you can just take off and on and it to me it sounds pretty much the same I will have it linked in the description if you'd like now I don't actually think the baritone guitar in the original track was a rubber bridge but it did give me a similar Plucky muted vibe that I was looking for [Music] okay so after probably like a year straight of being asked to do this I finally started a patreon you'll be able to see mix breakdowns for every single project on this channel that's when I go into Ableton and I show you exactly how I mixed the project this video on Lizzy McAlpine the NPR video The Rage Against the Machine video as well as a couple others that I had already posted on YouTube YouTube they're all there already waiting for you that's over 2 hours worth of tutorials that's for five bucks a month and if you'd like to pay $8 a month you also get all of the mixed stems on all of these projects and of course for every single project going forward and that includes Recreations any Originals or anything else that happens on this channel you'll have the mix breakdowns so check it out and thanks so much oo it's getting bright out here now despite being of course the biggest part of this Recreation vocals are actually pretty pretty simple Laura Mona came in and absolutely crushed it she matched lizz's delivery tone little nuances in her pitch she matched it perfectly I straight up could not have asked for a better performance hello uh what song would you like to promote in the Lizzy video from Muse do you add links or something yes Muse is for the people Pleasers for sure it's for the people who feel like they're there for everyone else and no one's there for them realizing that being in being is better than being in Bad Company and I produced it seriously she deserves your view and I worked on it so go check it out so given that Phil mention two different u47 microphones on verse one and verse two my L claron is the closest match for a u47 noyman is sound then it's just a matter of finding the right vocal mix Laura's vocal chain primarily consisted of an la2a just some minor eqing using the stock Ableton eq8 and Reverb there's also s several stages of dsing I use the free plugin TDR Nova if you'd like to use that and that gets rid of any harsh s sounds and lets us put the vocal right up on top at the highest volume without getting too many shrilly trebly transients now besides the harmonies the outro is really the only part that has more than one vocal layer and that's because there's a vocal double and an octave pitch shift then you're driving me home and it kind of comes out as I get up to go you kiss me in your car and it feels like the start of a movie I've seen before and that was present in the original track her vocals also run through a parallel chain this adds some breath back into her voice using uh slat's fresh air plugin [Music] ceilings [Music] PL can you just make it move faster [Music] let's add all of these layers up now so we can see how all these effects change the actual tone of the vocal but it's over then you're driving me home and it kind of comes out as I get up to go you kiss me in your car and it feels like the start of a movie I've seen before but it's not real and you don't exist and if we add the vocals on the guitar we get [Music] thiss you just make it move faster now the drums were more of an exercise in making good samples than actually tracking a full drum kit and lots of the beat is also comprised of found sounds our bag of rocks oh my it's two rocks a lot of mic adapters a ring let's start with the bigger kind of more explosive percussion because we saw an AKG c414 in some of the videos we close miked Michael's floor with a 414 and we saw another microphone out of frame above the drums so we took some creative Liberties and decided what we do is use a ribbon microphone it's going to give us a nice darker more distant sound now that process and the same recording setup was used to record his bass [Music] drum we then recorded actual kick samples for the outro we then added an independent high hat take and a crash and snare sample to make the actual outro drum sound let's add all of these elements on top of each other [Music] and now with the vocals and the guitar but it's not you exist and I can't last I kissed this leads us to to the found sounds snare sound we essentially made the exact same snare sound they did by recording as similar of tones as we could first and foremost using the roll of the fingers then we whacked some stick bundles to make the bamboo breaking sound a bunch of microphone stand adapters in a bag to make rocks then I bought some mac and cheese cuz I didn't have nuts at my store see same nuts string I had to make a decision do I try and find a violin player and recreate what Rob moose did with his beautiful arrangement or do I use emulations because that's kind of more accurate and more true to what I think a lot of you at home will be using I chose that option so Laura the singer as well as my friend Jordan Robinson shout out to both of them here are their contacts they both did separate transcriptions of the string arrangement but I am the first to admit I don't think it can touch the actual recorded sounds of Rob moose and what he did but if you're interested on screen is a patch that I built on a syn called vital it's a free synth that you can download for yourself and I basically modified an existing preset to make my string sounds and it's totally free so you can try and get a similar thing yourself and that's it so let's hear the results [Music] ceilings PL can you just make it move faster lovely to be sitting here with you you're kind of CID it raining harder my shoes are now full of water lovely to be rained on with you it's kind of cute but it's so short then you're driving me home and I don't want to leave but I have to go you kiss me in your car and it feels like the start of a movie I've seen [Music] before [Laughter] [Music] before that she no clothes touch me like nobody else does Lely to just lay here with you you're kind cute t I would say all of this but I don't want to ruin the moment love leaders sh between comfort and [Music] chaos but it's over then you're driving me home and it kind of comes out as I get up to go you kiss me in your car and it feels like the start of a movie I've seen before but it's not real and you don't exist and I can't recall the last time my was kissed it me in the car and feels like the end of a movie I've seen before before thank you so much for watching thanks to Callie for sponsoring during this video and I will see you at some point hopefully in uh less than a month

Channel: AudioHaze

Views: 33,145

Keywords: Lizzy McAlpine, Sound Like Lizzy McAlpine, LizzyMcAlpine tutorial, AudioHaze, Audio Haze, sound like audioahze, sound like audiohaze, audio haze Phoebe bridgers, audiohaze Phoebe bridgers

Id: p9A0BWHdFz0

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024