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How I Made Me Sound Like A 30 Part ChoirThis article describes how I recorded the choir parts for the song 'Precious Crush' from our album 'A Year Of Wednesdays'.
Make yourself a cup of tea, it's a fairly long one.(The recording was made on my Korg D1600 digital recorder but all the principles remain the same for any recording system). Part One - Getting In VoiceThe effect I was looking for in this song was like a massed Welsh choir - powerful, haunting and melodic. You know, everything that I'm not.Years ago I read an interview in a music magazine (the name of the person sadly escapes me), in which a cunning production secret was revealed: To make yourself sound convincingly like a group of backing singers you need to sing each part in a different 'accent'. So for each take you make a conscious effort to make your voice unique - an attempt at an impression if you like. And this technique is probably going to take you out of your comfort zone at first. 
That's because when you are recording these takes it's fair to say that you will feel pretty silly, and whoever is engineering the session will make no effort to disguise their mirth/horror/disgust at you, so do a trial by yourself in the sanctuary of your home studio before demonstrating this technique to the non-believers.Now for my choir part in 'Precious Crush' there was an extra little problem: No words. Just humming. So how could I hum in different accents? Go on - you try it. Go 'hmmmm' and see if you can make it sound like different people. Make sure you are alone, people have video cameras in their phones these days. Well if you are like me you might get a couple of slight variations by making the sound come out of your nose (and thoroughly embarrassing yourself). 
I began to think about the sound that a Welsh miner makes, and why. Is it because he spends 20 hours a day down a mine and comes home covered in coal dust with just a dead canary to show for it? Whatever it is, it is pretty distinctive. I got to thinking about resonance, and how my singing teacher used to talk about using the cavities in my head (yuk!) to get strength in sound. Then I remembered the exercises she gave me using vowel sounds. And I remembered hating them and thinking they were useless, and not doing them but telling her that I practised them all the time. As you do... So I got my old singing notebook out and found an exercise she gave me: Make a 'nor' sound and find the resonance in your head. Perfect. From now on call me Jones. I experimented with other vowel sounds, 'aargh' being a particular favourite, 'oooh' perhaps a little overdone but who knows, in context... Part Two - Recording And Mixing (or 'Indie-Muso Jones And The Tempo of Gloom')One of the biggest problems with multitracking yourself 30 times: the dreaded 'headphone bleed'....My headphones are pretty good but I like to test for bleed (sounds coming from the headphones that are loud enough for the microphone to pick up). Before I record anything that may be a quiet sound, or one where the background music is not going to mask any tiny unwanted stuff in the mix, I do a silence test. I have the performer wear headphones while I play a click-track (metronome clicks) at the volume they prefer. 
The performer does not make any sound, but moves around as if singing. (Because sometimes as they move a headphone may just slightly lift clear of the ear for a moment, and let a bit more sound escape. I want to test for this).I record about 30 seconds of this, and then play back the recording to see if I can hear any clicks in my speakers. If I can, I ask the performer to live with less volume in the headphones, the ideal being where I get zero clicks in my speakers but sometimes the performer just can't work with headphone levels that are very quiet. And with a performer like that, each take could contain a tiny bit of headphone bleed from the backing track - almost imperceptible, but there all the same. Now on one track that's fine, but by the time you combine 30 or so of these tracks in your mix, you have 30 or so low-volume identical copies of the backing track bleeding from the headphones... all added together and getting quite noticeable in the mix. So beware when using loud click-tracks in multiple takes. Now for the logistics of the recording...  The Korg D1600 recorder is a digital all-in-one system that is really easy to use and has lots of great features. It's mixer section has 16 track faders, one for each recorded track, but there's an extra twist... 
For each fader you can record up to 8 takes called 'virtual tracks' (labelled 'a' through to 'h'), but you can only select one of the virtual tracks for playback.So you can record a maximum of 128 takes (that's 16 x 8 ) but only play back 16 at a time. For the song 'Precious Crush' 14 of the 16 tracks were used up with other takes - music and lead vocals. I was planning on 30 tracks of choir (me). So I had to make a plan for a couple of 'bounces' to get all the choir tracks mixed down to 2-track (stereo) to include in the song. First job was to make a mono mix of the song to use as a guide track. Next I created a new song project for the choir which I called 'Boyo' and copied the mono song mix to track 1, virtual track 'a'.  That gave me the remaining 15 Boyo tracks (using each virtual track 'a') to use for vocal takes.  Singing in a miner key With the able assistance of my fellow band member Brett, I (Jones) recorded 15 tracks, trying to keep each take as different as possible, using 'nor' 'aargh' and 'oooh' type sounds, and by changing my mouth shape to get different tones if possible. Cellphones and cameras were banned from the studio in accordance with my official Recording Policy Guide, Section 27.2.1.6 (Avoiding Embarrassment While Pretending To Be A Miner). A miner major undertaking  Then I recorded a further 15 tracks, using each virtual track 'b'. Track 1 was left set to virtual track 'a' as I still wanted to hear the same mono guide track. Then came the fun of the mix... I gave this a bit of thought... 
I tried to visualize a real choir; where people would stand, how they were grouped, and my vision was one of a 3-tiered arrangement, with quite wide straight lines of people.My first stereo bounce was going to consist of the more central part of the choir. So I began my mix by taking each Jones virtual track 'a' and panning it to achieve a certain standing position in my imaginary choir. The 15 tracks were spread left to right in the stereo mix, which meant they were fairly close to each other. Not only that, but I made sure that no two similar tracks were panned next to each other. So if I had 4 tracks of me singing 'nor' I would arrange one panned full left, one panned mid left, one panned mid right, one panned full right. I worked like this until I had a fairly symmetrical set-up (which involved quite a bit of track auditioning and note-taking on paper). Ok, that took care of the stereo panning, but I still had all my voices in one line instead of three - all my voices were in the 'front row'.  I decided to create the three rows by establishing 3 reverb settings - one for each row. My thinking was this - if you (the listener) were standing in front of the choir in a large hall you would hear more direct sound from the front row than the other two rows as they are further away.  You would hear a bit less direct sound and a bit more of the hall (reverb) from the middle row, and less direct sound again (and more reverb) from the back row. Also the central part of the choir would project more direct sound to the listener than the outer parts (left and right sides). For the central part of the choir I chose to use a reverb effect with a large hall quality. Then I chose 5 tracks to be my front row and applied a 30% mix of reverb, chose 5 other tracks to be my middle row and applied a 45% mix of reverb, then the rest, which were my back row had a 60% mix of reverb. Phase one nearly done... So far all the Jones tracks were 'flat' that is, no eq had been applied. But I wanted to give each voice a slightly different sound to further give the impression of different people singing... I gave some tracks a 2-3dB boost, some a cut, using a different frequency setting for each track but keeping generally around 1k - 3 kHz, just enough to make a subtle difference. Next I bounced the track down to stereo using tracks 1&2, virtual track 'c'.  Jones has a cup of tea and feeds the canary. Phase two. I now switched to the 15 virtual tracks 'b' and did the whole process again but using a different reverb effect - one with a more cathedral-like quality. I bounced the result down to tracks 3&4, virtual track 'c'. So now I had two stereo mixes of 15 piece choirs.  More tea for Jones, Jenny Craigs for the canary. Playing back tracks 1-4, virtual track 'c' now. I panned my first stereo bounce (tracks 1&2) like this: track 1 mid-left, track 2 mid-right. This was my central choir group. Then I panned my second stereo bounce (tracks 3&4) like this: track 3 full-left, track 4 full-right. This was my outer choir group. Playing the 4 tracks together produced a glorious Jones choir that sounded great so I just did one more bounce down to stereo (to tracks 11&12 virtual track 'c') copied the result to the clipboard, and pasted it into the original song.  » And you can hear the result here » And you can hear the choir mixed in the song here » And you can hear the canary here Hope this has helped, and thanks for reading!! « Return to top of page Privacy Statement Disclaimer Contact |