No Pressure: Pascal Gabriel’s Laid-Back Approach

When recording any artist, I always call the tracks ‘vocals guide’ or something, so it’s not like ‘oh, I have to do my proper vocals now’ and they get really nervous. Most of Emma’s final lead vocals in Supercry have a good 20-30% of the original first take in them. Usually when the singer is carefree and not thinking too much about their delivery, you get some really good parts.

I used a 1960s Neumann U57 microphone with a really nice capsule in it. That goes through a UAD LA-610 then straight into the Apogee AD. I’ve got the sE Reflexion Filter, and that’s it — I never do the vocals in the live room, ever. It’s much better for the singers, they feel much more at ease. We can sit and chat about the song, which direction it’s going to go, and the mic is right there — it’s not like, ‘bye, you’re going to a different room.’

When mixing I’d usually put it back through the LA-610, sometimes I’ll send a couple of tracks back through the room, and that’s it. Other times I’ll track it through a different mic. I’ve got a vintage Sennheiser 421 which is nice and completely different — it’s not valve, it’s purely electronic, and it kind of softens the edges a bit.

The UAD plug-ins get a lot of use — I like the Urei simulation, the grey-face LA-2A, the Neve compressor and EQs. I actually had a hardware Neve and I never use it now because I found the UAD one was so close and so good, and instantly recordable, that it wasn’t worth working with the real thing. I think they’re very good plugs.

Pascal Gabriel: Artists like to be relaxed. When you get them in a relaxed situation, that’s really half the battle won because they’re not worried or feeling stressed. Anything about recording, or a studio with big red lights, I’m not going to have. I guess I’m quite good at making artists feel at ease — well, that’s what they tell me afterwards.

My studio is in a very old building in the south of France. The external wall is a rampart, like a fortress if you like. So the external walls are four feet deep because they were made to sustain cannon attacks and so on.

The tracking and control rooms are in the top floor. I call it a glorified bedroom studio because that’s what it looks like. It’s got great gear in it but it’s all set up in a very idiosyncratic fashion. It’s not very posh-looking. It’s very homely, like a living room. You can just chill out, have the lights low, and you get great views out the windows. I tried to make it looking as least like a studio as possible.

I’ve got several little amps in the live room; some big, some small. Often I’ll send stuff to the room using a mini Mackie desk for in and out, and I physically bring something out of the Apogee audio box and just send it to an amp. I do things like that mainly on vocals, sometimes on instruments that felt a bit sticky, and no amount of in-the-box delay or reverb is making it work. By re-miking them I effectively get a bit more realness in it.

Once you spew things out of the box and bring it back, it makes a big difference. Suddenly you have the air, the speaker performing, the mic performing, and the air in between performing. It creates a very different image of the sound which can sometimes really make it blend better in the mix.

There’s a couple of distant mics always set up in the room, and then depending on the sound, if I wanted a lo-fi mic, I’d use one of the cheap Eastern European mics I bought years ago and try them up close. If I wanted something nicer I might use a vintage Neumann, depending on what we were looking for. But the air is important, and mic position is very important.

Artists I’m working with stay in a house with us. My wife caters for them — she’s an excellent chef.

It’s great bat in the morning, no interviews. All they have to think about is their record, and that makes a massive difference.

They wake up and go for a run or whatever, we start at 11am, work until about 1:30pm, have lunch, work from 3pm until 8-9pm, then have dinner. After dinner we’ll go back upstairs, do an appraisal of the day’s work, then start again the next day. I’ve kind of honed it down to this set up over the last 10 years. It’s lovely, and it seems to work really well.