A Quote by Washed Out
I naturally like that dreamy, shoegazey sound on my vocals. A lot of reverb helps, and so do a lot of delay effects on everything.
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I don't think my vocals demand effects. I like reverb to a certain extent, but I don't want to hide my voice. I like stripped-down vocals, but I also like crazy, powerful, doubled vocals like in dance or electronic music.
A lot of the time, in pop music especially, there's reverb. And the reason is that reverb makes vocals sound better 99% of the time. It makes the notes ring out.
I usually like to hide my vocals behind the music. I don't like to hide them consciously, but I have a tendency to prefer the vocal at the same level as everything else and put lots of reverb on it.
For any producer I've ever worked with, their toughest job is to convince me to not to obscure my vocals. A lot of people don't like the sound of their own voice on, like, cassette tape or something. It's like that for me, and other songwriters I know. Like, "Oh God, that's what I sound like?"
I'm always saying in the studio, 'My vocals are too loud!' or 'My vocals have too much effect on them!' I like some of it, but I'm not a fan of loading effects onto my voice.
There's a lot of women now with a whole lot of style but they are not necessarily song stylists. Some of their style is a lot like me and a lot of people sound a lot alike - you can't tell them apart.
I stopped listening to a lot of music because I wanted to become more comfortable with what I naturally sound like.
There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.
I started doing some demos and got online and bought a refurbished laptop, bought a microphone off of eBay. A lot of folks said you can't really do it that way at a pro level, but I did some vocals that way, turned it into the label and they said, 'Wow, where did you record this? The vocals sound great!'
Lately I've been really into screaming a lot through delay [effects], having seven people on stage topless going crazy, stuff like that. Really in your face, but maybe more organic than choreographed dance moves.
I guess I'm not really into female vocals that sound masculine, I guess. A lot of times, the heavy female vocalists always end up sounding like they're screaming or whatever.
There's a lot of trickery that can go on in the studio, and there's a lot that one can do - none of which I am interested in even slightly. I mean, you can actually tune vocals and stuff like that, but it's so hideous, I can't believe it.
I hate the sound of my own voice. It's just up there, sort of naked and exposed. Live is hard, because on my records, I play almost everything on a lot of stuff. In a live situation, I can't control everything. I use two different microphones. One is just clean, traditional sound, and the other one is basically a cheap cassette-recorder microphone that goes through a distortion box to emulate my voice on the record. That helps some.
If I didn't have the reverb I'd be an unhappy camper. So I want reverb in my monitor mix. Reverb and a good level in my monitor and I'm all set.
Reverb does that thing where you make one sound and it grows to 20 times its original size and fills everything up.
I definitely prefer things to be dark, I definitely prefer things to not be particularly obvious. I like a lot of mystery in music, and I like it when things don't sound just like what they sound like always. But at the same time I like everything to sound very earnest and honest. So I don't really think that I have a definite stamp, but if people see that, that's awesome.
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