Sing It!
Recording vocals for An Ape’s Progress was an exciting effort that took about two months to complete. Working in isolation for this critical recording phase worked out fine — much to my relief!
Once my co-producer Thom and I felt we had all the instrumental parts built into strong “cue” tracks (for singing along with), we embarked on our vocal journey with microphone testing at Thom’s studio: Hi-Volt Sound. After trying a bunch of different vocal mics, we settled on the MikTek CV-4 large-diaphragm condenser as the best one for my voice, running into a Neve 5035 preamp / EQ / compressor. The CV-4 has a combination of warmth, presence, and “air” that no other mic in the room seemed to have (at least with my voice), so the choice was fairly easy. On the channel strip, we ran the preamp straight into the compressor, with the EQ bypassed. Some light compression for smoothing and character, and we were ready to record lead vocals. It was now up to me to do justice to our instrumental tracks by delivering some worthy lead-vocal performances!
With our microphone and signal path chosen, I returned to my home studio in early December 2020 and got set up for recording vocals in isolation. Thom and I worked one song at a time, starting with notes and suggestions from our demo / scratch tracks. Thom would give me direction as to vocal delivery, phrasing of certain words, and ideas for building energy and really communicating the lyrics — which are an important part of this album!
Once this vocal “pre-production” was complete, I sang between three and six takes of each lead, and passed the raw tracks to Thom for editing into a single composite take — a process known as “comping.” Thom is a master at comping, and usually sent me back a draft edit the same day, which I would then review and usually ask for a few tweaks. At that point, we had a finished lead-vocal comp for that song, and moved on to the next one. But first, I would I comp a “double” vocal track from the lead-comp leftovers, and pass those to Thom as well, for layering with the lead come mix time. Using this workflow, we got through all ten songs in about three weeks — then it was time to start recording harmonies and other vocal parts.
For backing vocals, we switched to an AKG C414 mic, which we knew would complement our lead-vocal mic and allow us to create a nice vocal blend in the mix. I sang four takes of my harmony parts for each song, and passed those tracks to Thom. My wife Libby sang backing vocals on half the songs: Proud American, Nickel and Dime, Opposable Thumb, Ship of Fools, and Crazy Crow (for Joni). Libby used the same C414 mic, and split her parts between extra layers of my harmonies and complementary parts and countermelodies of her own. By the end of February 2021, we were almost “sung” and ready to mix, but we needed a couple of extra vocal parts.
For two of our “production-piece” tracks — All for Nothing and Man in the Sky — we asked Libby’s sister Michal Patten to conceive and record some harmonies for the end sections, where the arrangements become lush and massive. Michal is an experienced singer, but hadn’t previously engineered her own recordings. Luckily, she was up for a challenge! After discussing a few options, we settled on an Apogee MiC connected to GarageBand on her iPad — which worked like a charm! After I sent Michal the two instrumental + vocal tracks to sing along with, she loaded them onto her iPad and was off and running. A few days later Michal sent me her vocal tracks, and we dropped them into our master sessions — the perfect finishing touches. Recording was now complete!
With all instrumental and vocal tracks now in the bag, we were ready to mix the album.
Time to start making sonic commitments and final decisions!
-Pawlie.
Completed vocal session in Apple’s Logic audio-production software — showing instrumental, lead-vocal, and backing-vocal tracks.
Lyric sheet from a lead-vocal session, showing pre-production notes.