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Producing Gretta Ray’s Vocals

Producing Gretta Ray’s Vocals

Engineer/producer Hamish Patrick explains how to record million-dollar vocals without the price tag.

21 November 2023

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.

FULL VOCAL SESSION FOR ‘LIGHT ON’

One of the most intensely edited and arranged tracks on Positive Spin. This is the very end of the process, where all Melodyne instances have been committed, and the top overlapping lead vocal tracks from individual sections (verse, chorus, etc) have been committed into one track for export to the mixer (LV PRINT). BVs have been consolidated into as few tracks as possible to make life easier for the producer, and tuning is committed without any specific processing beyond some RX processing (de-clicking and de-plosive in this case).

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LEAD VOCAL BEFORE COMMITTING

A combination of many different takes that have been comped together, faded, breath edited and volume levelled manually. Once these edits are done, I use Celemony’s Melodyne Studio to pitch edit each phrase to taste. One thing that’s made that a lot easier for big projects like this is Pro Tools’ new ARA integration, which allows you to access Melodyne right inside Pro Tools main window, making quick edits and aligning harmonies much easier. This was a huge time saver for Positive Spin – it meant I could swap out takes and make edits without having to re-import everything into Melodyne!

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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PRO TOOLS ARA INTEGRATION

Here’s the final tuning of the lead vocal for ‘Dear Seventeen’. I do this manually to make things feel as natural as possible (especially for leads), I also try to avoid using the macros, instead tuning specific phrases as required. Especially with an amazing singer like Gretta who’s grown up listening to tuned pop music, it’s remarkable how ‘AutoTuned’ her natural voice often sounds. Instead, I focus on fixing any small moments or nudging phrases that detract from the performance. For BVs, these are usually more felt than heard, so it’s important they closely match the lead in this type of pop music. I will generally tune these more aggressively, using Melodyne’s overlapping track feature to make sure notes and note transitions are matching between leads and doubles or harmonies.

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MELODYNING BVs

Gretta’s harmony arrangements are quite intricate! But using this mode, you can quickly cross reference two tracks within Melodyne to check timing and pitch alignment. It’s very, very useful! If you hold Option on a Mac and drag any bubble, you can move the pitch up or down by small increments, for more subtle adjustments. For something more natural, aim for within 20 cents either side of the pitch centre. For super-pop stuff, I’d aim for within 10 cents. Most of the ‘tuned’ sound in Melodyne comes from the Pitch Modulation tool. At 100%, Melodyne isn’t affecting the natural pitch waver of the vocal, even if you’ve changed the note centre; for a super-pop sound, you can take it as low as 50-60%! For most things, I wouldn’t take it below 85% unless you want it to sound intentional. Another tip is to change the onset and offramp of notes by moving the cursor to the lines in between notes – this makes a huge difference to how natural your edits will sound. Finally, make sure you set some key commands to make your Melodyne experience easier! I personally use the number keys above the main keyboard for ease of access. I set 1 as the note selection tool (the normal mouse pointer), 2 as the pitch tool, 3 as the note separation tool, 4 as timing and 5 as amplitude. Once you get the muscle memory going, you’ll absolutely fly through edits!

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.

VOCAL TEMPLATE FX

This massively speeds up the process of making things sound vibey or useful. It’s important to make an artist feel comfortable, and having some effects that you can quickly draw upon to help with that is essential.

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LISTENING BACK TO TAKES

The artist needs to hear something that puts the vocal in the world of the song. In this case, a simple RX Mouth De-Click module (which helps deal with small pops, clicks and mouth noises), Pro-Q3 (which is predominantly dealing with low and mid-range build up in stacked harmonies), Auto-Tune Pro X for a quick tuning job (this is generally replaced later with the much more surgical Melodyne, but can help to make things sound ‘pop’ quickly and sounds much better than most of the competition) and RVox for some very basic compression and levelling.

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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.

VOCAL CHAIN

The chain starts with RX Mouth De-Click for dealing with mouth noises. One significant issue with my room and mic combo was the build up of mid frequencies, so Pro-Q3 is dealing with that and some harshness. Both the LA-2A and 1176 compressors are working quite gently, aiming for no more than 2dB-ish of gain reduction. The UAD Pultec EQ is one of my favourite plugins on everything. Here, on its broadest setting, it’s dealing with some low/mids (which was very challenging) and the classic boost and attenuate trick at 8k. A second Pro-Q was dealing with some more specific problem frequencies, then RX De-Ess is dealing with some esses – these were manually edited too, so it’s not working very hard at all (1-2dB at the most). Finally, for a more ‘pop’ sound, Sonible’s SmartComp2 is doing a little more final compression of the whole thing.

PLAYLISTING

I use Pro Tools’ playlisting feature very heavily on all vocals. One of the biggest tips I learnt from working as mix engineer Tristan Hoogland’s assistant is to save versions as you work – being able to backtrack is super important! I’ve adapted this technique for vocal editing. As you can see from the screen grab, I’ll record takes of vocals on new playlists, as per normal. Once you pick a take, duplicate the playlist. I’ll use Pro Tools’ ARA Melodyne integration to tune this take. Once it’s tuned, I’ll duplicate the take, commit the tuning and add ‘TUNE’ to the end of the playlist name. I’ll then duplicate this playlist, and add ‘ALIGN’ to the end of the name – this track will be the final layer, where breath and timing editing occurs. This allows me to backtrack. If I notice some tuning error, or the artist wants to use a different take later in the process, it’s easy to go back and fix anything, as I’ve got each stage of the process on a separate playlist.

TIMING EDITING

For this final stage, I’ll do a combination of manual timing editing (often using Pro Tools’ Nudge feature and lots of fades) and automatic timing editing using VocAlign Ultra. VocAlign is great and can save you a lot of time, but you simply must check its work manually – often it gets 80 percent of a phrase perfect but makes a monumental mess of one or two lines. For this reason, I always recommend working phrase-by-phrase with VocAlign rather than batch processing an entire track!

I can’t overstate how important this step is to making everything feel slick and professional. The biggest difference between a pro-sounding production and something rougher is usually timing editing. Taking the time and care to go through your tracks and make sure BVs are in time with the lead makes a truly huge difference. I always like to reference to Ian Kirkpatrick’s work (Dua Lipa, Troye Sivan). The vocal editing is always phenomenal and makes such a difference in how the track hits you as a listener.

For this record, as we were recording in an imperfect room, I heavily edited breaths and gaps on most BV tracks. Trying to remove any additional noise is super helpful when going for a slick pop sound! You can see this in the screen grab – there are careful fades and breath edits that have been manually time aligned to the lead.

The other screenshot is of VocAlign Ultra. This is used in PT’s AudioSuite mode, where you can highlight a lead then a double or harmony and it will attempt to closely match their timing. It works pretty well most of the time!

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FINAL SESSION

Here’s the final production session for ‘Dear Seventeen’, the track I produced on Positive Spin. Vocals are in yellow and pink down the bottom half of the session – as these were printed with processing from the vocal production session, there’s minimal processing in this one. Some additional Pro-Q instances are helping with any specific clashes with the instrumentation, and there’s some additional effects – a combination of Altiverb, UAD Galaxy Tape and the SoundToys Little Plate that I’ve committed to audio for the mix engineer, Tristan Hoogland. As you can see with the BVs, I’ve condensed them even further down. Now that they’ve been tightly edited and I’m happy with the tuning and processing, I’ll consolidate them into as few tracks as possible.

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FAIRY DUST

A final little touch of de-essing, Goodhertz’s Faraday Limiter as a vocal leveller and UAD’s API strip taking off a very small amount of high presence before the mix bus!

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!