The instrumentation of each track plays an important part of supporting the melody for the entire album. As I mentioned in one of the other blog posts, I’m not the best singer… so the instrumentation did have to make up for some of the vocal shortcomings.
The first thing the instrumentation did is to cover up some of the not so great sounding parts of my voice by filling in the gaps. After the vocal tracking process was finished it was time to sweeten up the vocal takes… but just like squeezing a lemon… you can only get so much juice out. We had tracked vocals with some SSL micpreams going into the UA610, UA Precision channel strip, and LA-2A. This gave us some solid sounding vocals, but as the instruments started to add into the track it was clear that the vocals were not going to be the star.
At this point the decision was made to really go nuts with the guitar takes in order to make up for what was most likely going to be a vocally weak album… so that is what we did. All of the rhythm guitar tracks were tracked after the main vocal line was done, but before the backup vocals… this really brought the rhythm guitars to life. Now the guitar tracks were playing off of the vocal line and off of each other, which brought a LOT of motion into each song. After the rhythm guitars were finished we then went back and added in the backup vocal lines. The great thing was that with the busy rhythm guitars, the backup vocals could just take it easy.
I do have, and we will be releasing, acoustic versions of these songs. I think when I listen back to the songs without all the production I may have a more satisfied perspective on the vocals, now that the album is finished. However, while the album was being written it was clear that there was going to be a lot resting on the instrumentation of each track.