How to Sound Like Phoebe Bridgers

oh my God that record is so good crazy it sounds like everything is one thing except for her is it running all through a speaker it's muffled it's fuzzy it's old it's distorted how is that great I could answer that okay there is a plug-in we use very effectively that shall go unnamed so that you at home can't imitate this record it basically does what you're hearing I'm not telling people what you do is someone snitch on the plug in PSP I just want to screw the old idea of us so that was Tony Berg One of Phoebe's producers and that clip shows you just how important what we're about to do is Phoebe Bridges is one of if not the most popular Indie artists in the world right now everyone is trying to emulate her songwriting and just as importantly everyone is trying to emulate her production style but in demand producers and audio Engineers like to keep their sound a secret they want to be difficult to emulate and that's fair enough I I completely understand why producers need to protect their sound but my mission is to arm the bedroom producer with as many techniques and tools as possible in order to recreate what they did in a 10 million dollar studio in your bedroom so let's try and spoil their secrets today I'll be digging up as much media and as much evidence as I can possibly find to figure out what tools and what techniques were used to record a garden song then emulating those techniques with the tools that I have available to me and that you might have available to you first let's line up the suspects the main characters in terms of the production of this album so we have Phoebe Bridgers the songwriter and the artist obviously we have Tony Berg the co-producer you should see his credits list by the way it's insane Ethan bruska is also the co-producer and then we have Harrison Whitford who is the guitarist so let's break down this record by analyzing media from each one of these individuals okay so I want to show you a quick sneak peek of something what you're looking at is a few different drafts of the rough mixes of this project the first one thank you second one Someday I'm gonna live and then we added our own vocalist over top of it and that is as much of a sneak peek as I'm willing to give right now how many of you use Wii transfer or Dropbox in order to ship your audio project forward well this whole organizational scheme that you're looking at on the screen right now where we have real time a being this is like a Wii transfer or Dropbox meant specifically for a musician and this is our sponsor samply so not only can you share downloadable links with clients you can leave comments on the timeline you can span these comments across real time lossless audio files and you can a b between them directly and it will automatically put these in chronological order samply also has a bunch of really cool tools built into the interface you can match the loudness of different mixes so you can actually a b without loudness bias in this interface you have built-in storage so you can see I have the project file here ready to download the links that you send are time stamped and they have the views built in so you can see when and where they viewed them within samply you can even specify payment information it has stripe payments built in so if you'd like to work with the same program that audio Engineers for Taylor Swift Mac DeMarco and like Doja cat have I would check out samply there's a bunch of different pricing plans including a free one use that link down below and thanks to samply for sponsoring today's video let's get back to it it's well documented that Phoebe uses Gibson guitars and Waterloo guitars I found this clip of her describing her vintage Gibson actually it's a really old and it's really small and there's only a couple of them or not a couple but there's like only a couple hundred of them in the world well I can tell you one thing we won't be able to emulate that guitar because of the Rarity of this instrument we'll be using my roommates Martin that'll give us a pretty dark tone especially because they have some pretty dead strings Phoebe is also constantly doubling her vocal takes on the main vocal that means underlaying at least one extra vocal layer in order to give a little bit more thickness and harmonic interest to her vocal it's also very subtle unless you're paying attention to it you don't really hear it in the record but if you remove it from the record like this you can hear it a little better when you got taller foreign I also scrubbed through the internet to try and figure out what Mike was used on this record she actually revealed the mic that she used in her home studio back during the pandemic which I thought could maybe give me some leads but um just watch the clip myself like for real dude Phoebe no I can't I don't know what that is giant opaque pop filter in the middle of it all right well this is a dead end and uh I gave up until my roommate had the fantastic idea of looking through all the archived story posts during the production of the record and although a lot of it was just her waking up Harrison and Ethan while they slept on the couch [Music] foreign that was actually most of it but I did find this Frame I will be basing my mic decision off of this very grainy photo because that my friends that looks like a u47 a 20 000 microphone I'm like usually used for lead vocals and when you combine that with the fact that it looks like it has a pop filter on top of it we'll assume this is the microphone used on Garden song next suspects The Producers Tony Berg and Ethan gruska so let's take a look back at that clip I showed at the beginning it sounds like everything is one thing except for her that's a point is it running all through a speaker it's muffled it's fuzzy it's old it's distorted is the whole track going through one signal chain except for hers there is a plug-in we used very effectively that shall go unnamed so that you at home can't imitate This Record you will not stop me basically does what you're hearing uh but it's almost every car it's on the guitar on the guitar we've rolled off all the top ends yeah it's just this pulse yeah it sounds like it's side chained to the guitar track so the guitar track is popping slightly underneath it yes yeah Jack I love you making this whole video possible is it two guitars yep both rubbers rubber Bridge one is I don't think both of them I think there's a 12. I think there's a 12th string on it too yeah in the chorus 12 string on the chorus so those are five or six points I actually don't remember you'll see in the edit that we can absolutely use as the master plan the Bible for how to make this production thank you Jack for doing this and then also making patreon okay so let's talk about this mystery plug-in essentially what we're looking for is a plug-in that has some sort of harmonic degradation and a very digital sort of way you can hear it on the guitars in the beginning if you pay attention [Music] foreign anyways two plugins started showing up in these comments codec by at least less lease and cassette by waves Factory so I I bought both of them actually codec is free and we will be trying these out final suspect Harrison Whitford guitarist extraordinaire seriously he's in he's an insane guitarist so I didn't really find any videos or anything explaining his gear but I did find this very helpful article by stryman it was an interview I gathered a few things here one Harrison loves small amps that break up very easily meaning they distort at very low volumes he often uses Hollow Bodies with flat wound strings for finger picking patterns there's finger picking all over the song that's not a third point he loves to contrast fuzzy dirty tones with clean tones along different parts of the stereo image maybe take that clean guitar put it on the right which does happen in the song and then maybe put 30 ones on the left or something like that okay so let's recap so from Phoebe we learned double all of our lead vocals to use a darker mellow guitar like a Martin or a Gibson or an epiphone if you don't want to spend two thousand dollars on an instrument it's also not a third point there is a strong chance that she's using a Neumann u47 for the lead vocals from Ethan and Tony we learned the guitars are side chained to the kick and that kick is designed to be very dark like a pulse like a heartbeat there's one 12 string there's one rubber Bridge acoustic and there's one regular acoustic all the instruments are very dark and glued together this allows the vocal to sit atop all of them and occupy most of the harmonic information this is a very popular technique in modern production and they're using a mystery plug-in in order to accomplish this sort of glue effect I think these plugins are either codec or cassette from Harrison we learn to use flat wound strings on a hollow body guitar use an amp that breaks up very easily and contrast dirty and clean tones along the stereo image let's get started all right well it has been oh a month I think I think it's been a month this was really hard so on the Radiohead video which is kind of like the spiritual predecessor to this one I saw everything that they did in that video it was really just a matter of looking at the microphones looking at the microphone position and emulating that to the best of my ability and then mixing it to kind of match based off that info not here there is endless degrees of experimentation on this one we're really plotting points here based off of the general direction that we learned in the first half of this video and you know iterating you'll see let's start with the drums we chose to record an actual kick just because it seemed like more fun and it's always more fun to do it with friends and on that note shout out to M Hodge the best drum producer this side of the Brooklyn Bridge so we recorded two different types of kicks we recorded a wool beater and a regular kick beater both of those were then recorded with two different microphones and oc818 as the kick out and a Sennheiser e-902 for the kick in we also padded it with a lot of fabric and that'll give us a nice thick short thump which is what I like the goal with the wool beater was to get more of a softer rounder tone and perhaps we could sum those tones together in order to get a beefier pulse quite honestly I ended up getting a ton of phase issues whenever I was trying to combine the wool and the kick beater and I even got phase issues with the kick out and the kick in when I was combining them so I ended up just using the regular kick in mic on the regular beater here you can compare the sounds for yourself [Music] that's all that happened with the kick pretty simple okay guys strap in for the guitars uh this one is a show here was the plan record four takes on the Taylor and four takes on the Martin in the following configurations so for both the Martin and the Taylor one take with the rubber Bridge using the lauten Clarion microphone one take with the rubber Bridge using a new 20s retro microphone it's this beautiful microphone that they make in Spain and it kind of gives you the sound of the 20s in a more contemporary fashion Tony you would you would love it then I did the same exact microphones but without the rubber Bridge attachment and I did those four takes for the Martin and the Taylor again we're plotting points here we're trying to figure out which of these tones worked and which of these tones do not the next question was how in the world are we going to get this rubber Bridge sound because rubber Bridges if you don't know uh they replace the actual Bridge of your instrument with a rubber bridge this is a permanent modification to your guitar and also not something I was willing to do to my only acoustic guitar and my roommates only acoustic guitar so first I uh first I tried this thing this is a clamp with foam that you snap over the strings and it deadens the strings [Music] not great um it sounded like it sounded like don't don't buy one uh next I actually saw someone online mention that you can use a rubber tube that you can buy from a hardware store and you can kind of shove it under the strings and it can deaden the strings in that way and that seemed to work pretty well [Music] I actually tracked all of the rubber Bridge Parts using this method but after listing back I noticed that the high strings particularly the B string and a little bit of the E string they were quite Buzzy I also noticed that it gave a really peaky kind of quacky upper mid-range [Music] and this nasal quality really wasn't what I was looking for so after mixing all that for like two days I went back to the drawing board now going back to M Hodge local drumming hero he actually recommended me this thing this thing right here um this thing called a Babolat vibrant kill Babolat babelot Babble that um this thing is awesome and you should buy one heyo bablat if you ever want to sponsor a video hit me up so it's a silicone mold and it doesn't just sit on top of it it actually envelops the strings using these little slots here and this effectively recreates a rubber Bridge while sitting on top of your guitar but it's like 15 bucks this is for a this is for a tennis racket I didn't know that bro I didn't even know this was for a tennis racket I thought this was for a guitar well Babolat you should change your marketing because you're gonna make a killing if you Market these things towards guitarists if you do it I want a percentage of it I'm serious I am serious though [Music] foreign was wondering why it had counterweights inside of it that makes sense after all of this experimentation I finally settled on a rubber Taylor bridge on the left side of the stereo image a rubber tailored Martin on the right side and that's to give us some tonal variation like Harrison had mentioned in the prior document so those two things are on the left and right and I actually put a Martin in the center with no rubber bridge to kind of glue that stereo image together that is played by my friend Maddie shout out to Maddie all of that for three guitar takes and then finally I just added an acoustic guitar in the chorus playing an octave lead to try and emulate that 12 string tone all right so let's address the elephant in the room after mixing the song for nearly a month I've gotten pretty familiar with both cassette and codec and garden song I don't know if I'm ever gonna listen to the song again but let's talk about these two plugins cassette it degrades the audio in like the simulation of Aging tape destroying old analog tape that's very different from the sort of digital destruction that I mentioned earlier in the video so while it's almost certainly not the plug-in used on this record I found I placed it all over the track on the guitars and on the return tracks to try and pump in a little bit of that Lo-Fi Vibe and it was very helpful in this mix codec is much more likely to be the plug-in considering it is basically the exact same sort of algorithm doing this Lo-Fi digital granular degradation but I didn't find that whatever algorithms are making the tone of codec to be particularly accurate well I actually ended up using cassette more and I actually only used it on one or two of the guitar tape I found it I found the plugin and I have proof what yes the plugin is called wassi lossy by good Hertz bro I already finished the mix it's done well redo it redo the mix are you serious right now no I'm not gonna redo it that took so long man but go work on the mix finish it up redo it and then I will present this part of the video all right are you serious right now I mean okay I guess cool sure in a Tape Op interview that Ethan gruska gave four years ago Ethan mentions using the lossy plug-in on his personal project and also on the upcoming Phoebe record by the way I don't know if this was deleted from the interview or there's a larger version of the interview somewhere but this is not on the site I found a screenshot given that he mentioned that this is his favorite plugin that it's used on the record and it nearly exactly matches the description of the plugin that we're looking for I'm 95 sure this is the plug-in now let's just wait for the other version of me to finish mixing it two days later look I'm too worried that they're gonna copyright this video for that stupid joke about SpongeBob so I just did it myself I know it's not as good but whatever I I don't want my Revenue to be gone because of this stupid the mix is a lot more accurate now so every instance of codec has been replaced with lossy and about half the instances of cassette have been replaced with velocity now in part two which I will make if there's any interest so please like and share and subscribe all the things that boost this in the algorithm it's a really small Channel at the time so we really need that in order to support these kinds of videos if this video gets enough steam I will for sure do a mixing video breaking down all of this in a little bit more detail so mystery solved and Ethan I'm sorry if this got you in trouble love your work okay vocals vocals are always tricky when you're doing a Phoebe cover for the exact reason that we've been talking about through this entire video everything is one thing and then there's Phoebe she just genuinely carries like all the harmonic information the Sonic signature of her voice is very important so that means if you're not Phoebe it is incredibly hard to emulate but just killed it so shout out to Jess you can check her out here if you'd like we used a loud and Clarion again because that is the microphone that I own that most closely relates to and sounds like a Neumann microphone which we know Phoebe uses one really crucial part of recording Phoebe is to use less chess to use a more heady voice and do it like right up to the microphone sing quietly and gently because of the proximity of that microphone to your mouth you're still going to get a really huge full vocal take so we actually recorded with too much chest the first time I think there was uh not really a belt but there was more power than was necessary Phoebe was singing really quietly so we redid that take in order to get a quieter more breathy tone here is the comparison between those two takes and when I grow up I'm gonna look up for my phone and see my life and when I grow up I'm gonna look up from my phone and see my life and the rest obviously is quite a large mixing game on that note if you'd like to mix this yourself you can download all the stems for free using our sponsor samply just click the link down there and if you'd like to use samply remember there is a free option we'll make a part two so again please subscribe like share all the things that help the video I really appreciate it okay so without further ado let's hear The Mix [Music] [Music] Someday I'm gonna live in your house up on the hill and when your skinhead neighbor goes missing I'll plant a garden roses on a flat bed you should see it I mean thousands I grew up here till it all went up in Flames except the notches and the door frame I don't know when you got taller see your Reflections in the water off the bridge at the Huntington I have defense when I was 17. that I know [Music] and when I grow up I'm gonna look up from my phone and see my wife and it's gonna be just like my recurring dream I'm at the movies I don't remember what I'm seeing this screen turned in to the Title Wave then it's a dorm room like a Hench Maze and when I find you you touched my leg and I insist but I wake up before we do it [Music] I don't know how but I'm taller it must be something in the water everything's growing in our garden you don't have to know that it's haunted the doctor put her hands over my liver she told me my resentment's getting smaller no I'm not afraid of hard work I get everything I want I have everything [Music] [Music] [Music] all right folks thank you for sticking around thanks to sampley for sponsoring this video again these videos are nothing without the support of you guys so if you can share it all those things it would mean the world I I pour my soul into these way more than I think is probably healthy anyways I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you around in the next one

Channel: AudioHaze

Views: 189,162

Keywords: Sound like Phoebe bridgers, Phoebe bridgers, garden song, Tony berg, Ethan gruska, how to sound like Phoebe bridgers, Phoebe birdgers, audiohaze, audio haze, Phoebe Bridgers garden song, garden song Phoebe bridgers, Phoebe Bridgers production style

Id: QtalnE-5t3o

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023