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Producing Gretta Ray’s Vocals
Engineer/producer Hamish Patrick explains how to record million-dollar vocals without the price tag.
![Positive-Spin_Album](https://www.audiotechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Positive-Spin_Album.jpg)
Artist: Gretta Ray
Album: Positive Spin
‘Positive Spin’ is a pop album that provides a fitting platform for Gretta Ray’s stunning vocal delivery. Her lyrics are intricate, personal and presented in pristine detail. The vocal production needs to keep up. Gretta’s close-knit production team had a choice: go hard in a commercial studio for three or four days, or take a more leisurely route from the team’s production suites in Collingwood. They chose the more chill approach, but it didn’t come without its challenges. Producer/engineer Hamish Patrick picks up the story:
THE BRIEF
Hamish Patrick: Gretta’s lyrics are everything. She’s invested so much into the emotion of those lyrics. So being comfortable and delivering those lyrics with full emotional honesty is really important.
Gretta also wanted this album to be a full-blown pop album. It would mean the vocals would be bright, loud, compressed and impossible to ignore. This meant we knew as a production team we would need to produce a vocal that sounded as consistent as possible — no variation in tonal quality within a song or between songs. In other words, we had to lock down every possible source of variation. It would start with the recording space.
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THE ROOM
We were recording Gretta’s vocals in my production suite. It’s a space that Gretta is familiar with and comfortable in. It was originally designed as a drum room, so there’s acoustic treatment in there but not to the degree that you’d treat a vocal booth.
We moved the microphone around and tried different spots to find a position that didn’t accentuate the bad stuff. Once we determined where that was, we taped an ‘X’ on the floor and didn’t move from that position. Just like most people recording from home, you could hear a little bit of flutter and a little bit of background noise. In our case, we also had people walking past the studio door occasionally.
THE GEAR
For consistency’s sake we wanted to settle on one microphone for all the vocal recordings. We didn’t have a bunch of expensive mics to choose from. We settled on a Chandler TG mic. It’s certainly not a budget mic but it’s not out-of-reach either. Gretta has an amazing voice and really good control. But the biggest challenge we found was the 2 to 5kHz range, which can be harsh. We were trying to find a mic that gave a tape-like roll-off in that frequency area.
We didn’t have racks of preamps to choose from. We recorded the vocals through a pretty standard UA Apollo chain — nothing out of the ordinary. We didn’t track any plug-ins on the way in. We thought about recording with some gentle compression but I think we decided recording raw would give us more options later.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY
As a vocal producer it’s your job to coax the very best performance from the artist, and a large part of that is knowing when to push and when to back off. It’s the interpersonal stuff.
These days studio engineers are expected to fix performances after the fact. Artists tend to have short attention spans now. They expect things to happen quickly and, often, budgets are tight and time is short. Your job is to make the artist feel comfortable and make sure they can perform at their best.
Gretta needed a safe space to be emotionally vulnerable, but she’s also very hard on herself and needed support at points (even when she delivers a near-perfect performance!).
MIX ON THE RUN
Gretta is definitely someone who needs to hear a high-quality rough mix as she goes. I would create a good-sounding mix with some effects, processing, and some panning of backing vocals, so Gretta could get involved with the song as we listen back during the recording process. None of what I was doing would be used in the final mix, it was just for the purposes of listening. That’s another piece of advice I’d offer: artists these days won’t understand why they’re not hearing something ‘produced’ during the recording process, in fact, if they don’t, it could badly demoralise them.
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MELODYNE FORENSICS
After about a day of recording vocals for a song I would spend about a day, or a day and a half, on Melodyning and editing everything. For this album, Gretta was after a processed pop sound. So everything is very, very closely tuned and edited. Most of the harmonies have at least four stacks – maybe a couple of BVs in the left and right, with the lead in the middle. There’s an amazing level of detail, so I’m doing my best to be just as detailed with breath editing and de-clicking – making sure the fades were all exactly right. I’ll also be forensic with the time editing, making sure all of the BVs and the lead move really closely together. If every BV double was slightly out of time relative to each other then we wouldn’t achieve that super-tight pop sound. You can read more about the pitch and timing edit process later in the article.
VOCAL CHAIN
The S’s on Gretta’s vocal were the biggest challenge. We were making quite a bright-sounding record and a very loud pop record, so we would manually de-ess in addition to using de-esser plugins.
As far as plugins go, at the start of the chain was a more forensic EQ (like a FabFilter Pro-Q3) then a couple of stages of gentle compression – we generally used a UA LA2A and a 1176. Gretta’s vocal doesn’t respond to one-stage of more severe compression, so we’re better off having a couple of stages.
I’m a big fan of the UA Pultec EQ-P1A, for a gentle presence boost or to cut some low/mid. It’s the sort of EQ plugin that forces you to use your ears and not your eyes, which I like.
At all times I’m aiming to finish with a vocal quality that sounds as close to the other songs as possible.
Consistency is everything for this album. The goal was not to have a really organic vocal performance, but a consistent vocal that would consistently would cut through at all times.
Finally, we would often use the McDSP ML4 compressor/limiter over the vocal group. When you hear a low/mid build up or the highs build up, the ML4 lets you control that sort of thing very effectively. It’s a really useful tool at the end of vocal chain tool to just control stuff when you have a lot of vocal elements coming together.
For backing vocals, the other producer on the album, Gab Strum, is a big fan of the Eventide H3000. He’s got a hardware unit and loves it. I tend to use the SoundToys Microshift plugin or the plugin version of the H3000. Those widener plugins are great on BV stacks to make them more expansive in the mix. For the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ those type of plugins are unstoppable. I’m a fan of EchoBoy for delays as well.
artists these days won’t understand why they’re not hearing something ‘produced’ during the recording process, in fact, if they don’t, it could badly demoralise them.
![10.-Gretta-LV-chain-1-pichi](https://www.audiotechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/10.-Gretta-LV-chain-1-pichi.jpg)
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![13.-Vocal-playlisting-tip-pichi](https://www.audiotechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/13.-Vocal-playlisting-tip-pichi.jpg)
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MELODYNE MAESTRO
Here’s a final thought: you don’t need crazy-expensive tools to do a good job! Close editing and a basic copy of Melodyne Essential (A$129) will get you 90 percent of the results the pro engineers are achieving. The other tools I’ve mentioned make life just a little bit easier but you’ll get a similar result with your DAW’s bundled plugins.
Remember: great-sounding vocals aren’t something you can rush. You need to take your time to make the artist feel comfortable; take your time listening and doing the best job that you can! More often than not, the vocals are the focus, it’s where the humanity and emotion of the song will mostly come through. A good lead vocal comp will show the artist in the best light and make them feel great, and this just takes time and care. Once you’ve got a great lead vocal, making sure the BVs support the lead and help tell that story is the goal. Time, care and Melodyne will get you there!