EQ Magazine - November 2008 - (Page 24)

ANOTHER DAY The concept was to make the album slightly drier-sounding and more modern. Less reverb seems to be equated with a more-modern sound than the traditional Brian Wilson sound, but the finished mix sounds good. The new album is arranged like a suite with no breaks between tracks. How did you record with that in mind? The songs are distinct, and there aren’t any segues, per se, except for the narration. But you can split it all up pretty easily. In a couple of cases, the band played the first couple of bars of the next section. The arrangement of the pieces we already knew—how these things connected timing-wise and arrangement-wise. The whole thing was arranged in demo form close to what was ultimately recorded. Then, the players learned to record it as one piece of music. By the time it got to the studio, all the pre-work was done—which is why it only took us two days to record the basic tracks. I spoke with [drummer] Todd Sucherman, who mentioned that Brian would offer ideas that wouldn’t seem to work in theory, but worked great in application. That is something Brian is renowned for. One story has it that Brian was doing a session in the ’60s with 15 guys, and he dictated a chord to the players, and somebody said, “Brian, that doesn’t fit with the root.” Brian said, “When I add the vocals it will.” If you want a wonderful example of that, go to disc five of the Good Vibrations box, and listen to the backing track of “I Get Around.” Understand that when that basic track was cut nobody was singing, and Brian had the whole conception of the record with the vocals in his head. On the second “Round, round, get around, I get around” before the vamp, you’ll hear a chord you won’t expect, and no one plays that chord live. It is a very odd chord, but it works perfectly with the vocals. It blew my mind that he had a bunch of musicians play that track knowing in his head what it would sound like with the vocals, but without hearing it. That’s an amazing piece of work. Is that reflected at all in the way Brian works now? Yes, you get that sense. If Brian is doing his own backgrounds—as on the demos—he will build up a vocal stack equivalent to what he would do with his current band, or like he did with the Beach Boys. It’s like he’s a tape recorder, and you are just playing it back. Brian will lay down the first part, double and triple it, and then do the second part the same way. He will have the harmony structure in his head, and he will simply nail the parts. If others are doing the backgrounds, he directs each person—he has it all figured it out. How does Brian like to record his vocals? It’s usually just him and me. We’ll do a couple of takes, and once we get a take we think is pretty much there, we might do a little comping, and then go back and check different lines in different verses. I don’t really get too many comments from him about the sound of his voice. We’ve used a variety of mics over the years. For this, it was pretty much a Neumann M49—though I’ve used a U67 a lot. He doesn’t seem to mind which mic we use. One of the things that Chuck Britz—who did most of the recordings from the ’60s—used to talk about was that he would record Brian’s lead vocal on the equivalent of a Shure SM57. I can tell listening to the old recordings when that is happening, or when he is using an old Neumann U47, because you can hear a lot of wind blast. That didn’t concern them in those days, because anything below 50Hz was chopped off the record in mastering. What would you say is Brian’s basic vocal tonality? As he has aged, his voice has gotten a bit lower. When he was younger, he could hit ridiculous notes with his falsetto. He tailors his voice now toward a more mature sound. I record his vocals pretty much flat—usually through a custom Universal Audio 610 preamp. There is very limited EQ on that, so I will sometimes add low end—although I don’t like to add EQ when I record. One of the advantages of high-resolution digital recording is that you don’t have to worry so much about signal-to-noise. Back in the day, you had to be more conscious of putting something to tape because you weren’t going to be able to 24 EQ NOVEMBER 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.royerlabs.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - November 2008

EQ Magazine - November 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Brian Wilson Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Sony Acid 6 Abelton Live 7 Controller World New Controllers Analysis Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - November 2008

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