Jeff Lynne and ELO (Electric Light Orchestra)

  • Thread starter Thread starter hobbestheprince
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"On the actual recording the part when they go, "Doo wop ... doo bee doo wop ..." sounds like there's something on them."


tons of compression and EQ is a start. ill check out the song later and see if i can figure out exactly what hes singing and maybe try to duplicate it myself, now im curious :D


also, when you double and triple track harmonies a certain way and adjust the tone of your voice to fit the song, im not exactly sure of the term, but your voice starts doing a flanger effect and going in and out of phase with itself. you really have to pay attention to the tone of your voice and though it might sound out of place and kind of weird in a single track, once you start building them up it really starts to sound good.
 
nddhc said:
"tons of compression and EQ is a start. ill check out the song later and see if i can figure out exactly what hes singing and maybe try to duplicate it myself, now im curious :D
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What I recommend you listen to then is "Turn to Stone" by ELO. Here's the video even though the quality of sound isn't that great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5pG4G8rq4c

The best bits are when the harmony kicks in and sings after the lead singer does. Odd sounding but really cool. This is exactly what I wanna pull off.
 
Hey nddhc, have you tried it yet? I was going to last night, but there was a bad thunderstorm and the power went out.
 
K im not the best singer in the world so the actual "lead" lines sound a bit strained.. I just wanted to figure out the basic harmony so I really didnt go further than the initial 8 bars or so of this song

There is some digital clipping because right now im in between interfaces so all my audio is being routed through an MAudio Ozonic controller (which I havent spent a whole lot of time learning yet :eek: )

You can check it out here
http://rapidshare.com/files/31739075/turntostone.mp3.html


From what i can hear in the harmonies hes doing a 4 part harmony throughout the song with most of the parts in falsetto except the bottom one. The tone of your voice has a lot to do with it as well.. My falsetto tone is kinda high and thin and his is kind of low and thick sounding which adds to the ELO sound.


If youre curious, I double tracked each part and didnt go too crazy with the panning - most of them are slightly off to the left. I individually compressed one or two of the tracks as needed. All the harmonies were sent to a stereo bus with (in this order)

-HEAVY Compression and a gate. I tweaked this combo to give me kind of a "shhhhh"ing sound as the words come in and out.

-A slight delay on the right speaker (like 10ms or so? Im using Adobe Audition and it shows it in beats so im not 100% certain)

-And finally, an EQ heavily boosting the 2khz mids


But this is as close as I could get with the limitations of my voice.. I think recording to tape would influence the sound a lot as well.

Now im going to try and sequence that keyboard part...this song is fun to figure out :D
 
Hi,
I've no doubt that Jeff Lynne was probably trying to emulate The Beatles' harmonies as he is a huge Beatles fan and when he was with The Move, he had a chance to pop in once to see The Beatles recording at Abbey Road.

No accident that they recorded/sung 'Because' (as another poster noted), if you ask me. The Beatles recorded that track by (George, John and Paul) singing live with each other and then they triple tracked it (can't remember if that was done by them singing another two times, or done by layering the same part another two times).

I've always admired Jeff Lynne's talent and abilities (singing, arranging, pitch), but hated the sounds he has produced: to me, those songs would be much better if they sounded different. As far as I'm concerned, he ruined George Harrison's 'Cloud Nine' album with all those ELO type sounds, but its undeniable that he has a sound.

Not meaning to distract from discussion of how he got that sound.

GVDV
 
nddhc said:
-HEAVY Compression and a gate. I tweaked this combo to give me kind of a "shhhhh"ing sound as the words come in and out.

-A slight delay on the right speaker (like 10ms or so? Im using Adobe Audition and it shows it in beats so im not 100% certain)

-And finally, an EQ heavily boosting the 2khz mids
Click to expand...

Haha that is wild! Sounds nearly exact. I think you're right about the recording to tape, I believe he mentioned that in an interview actually.

Funny you mentioned using Adobe Audition, I use Cool Edit Pro and I am too stubborn to let it go so I haven't tried out Audition yet. I heard they are basically the same thing anyways ;)

One thing I never really understood in Cool Edit is when it comes to compression. I never get when someone says to compress it heavily. I tried looking up info on it but it normally doesn't deal with Cool Edit sadly :( Another thing is the gate ... I'm not sure what that even does ...

The slight delay thing I have tried to fiddle around with, but got nowhere quickly. Where did you go to set it up just slightly? I normally would just slide the soundblock over a tad, but I wouldn't mind figuring this out as well. The EQ part is the only part I really get, since I've fooled around with it for harmonies ... I did a few simple things like removing some mids for a more muffled sound so it's harder to figure out the harmonies, etc.

If anyone has info on those steps mentioned above could you post a quick little piece of how they work? And if you have Cool Edit or Adobe Audition, even better! :D
 
Im using Adobe Audition 1.5, so Cool Edit Pro 2.0 would be exactly the same (pretty much)

I tried a Demo of 2.0 and didnt like the fact that you had to save your files before you started working :eek: Thats what I like about Adobe 1.5 is that you can open it up, start recording, and if you dont like it- dont save it! Then you dont have a bunch of files to clean up afterwards... Hey what can I say, im a computer neat freak

I hate saying this but I mainly used the presets on this one :mad:


Anyways, the effects I used (in this order)

-Dynamics Processing - ElecGuitGate preset

-Delay (my own settings - Left channel Delay .001 beats, Mixing 38% with the Invert option checked, Right channel Delay .100 beats, Mixing 26% with invert NOT checked)

-Graphic Equalizer plugin - I started with the Vocal Presence Boost preset and adjusted that til it sounded good... I boosted the 2khz mids a little more and lowered some of the extreme lows


THE TRUTH COMES OUT! haha
 
nddhc said:
Im using Adobe Audition 1.5, so Cool Edit Pro 2.0 would be exactly the same (pretty much)

I tried a Demo of 2.0 and didnt like the fact that you had to save your files before you started working :eek: Thats what I like about Adobe 1.5 is that you can open it up, start recording, and if you dont like it- dont save it! Then you dont have a bunch of files to clean up afterwards... Hey what can I say, im a computer neat freak

I hate saying this but I mainly used the presets on this one :mad:


Anyways, the effects I used (in this order)

-Dynamics Processing - ElecGuitGate preset

-Delay (my own settings - Left channel Delay .001 beats, Mixing 38% with the Invert option checked, Right channel Delay .100 beats, Mixing 26% with invert NOT checked)

-Graphic Equalizer plugin - I started with the Vocal Presence Boost preset and adjusted that til it sounded good... I boosted the 2khz mids a little more and lowered some of the extreme lows


THE TRUTH COMES OUT! haha
Click to expand...

Did you do that on each harmony track, or just the collection of them? Here's my harmonies without anything added ... I did about 6 or 7 tracks for each harmony, just overdubbing the same line over and over.

Harmony Bit
 
I setup a single bus. Incase you dont know how, this is what you have to do - Go to Window, Mixer, Bus mixer, "New", then add all the effects and settings in the order I told you

Then for each harmony track, while youre in the multitrack view, on the lefthand side there are 3 buttons next to each other "Vol" "EQ" and "BUS." Click "EQ" and now for each track it will give you an option for your output. My default goes to "Out1" so I click on that and then it gives you all your output options. On the bottom of this window it also gives you your Bus options, so click on the bus you just created. I did this for every harmony track. Since it was a 4 part harmony and I double tracked each part I had 8 tracks that were being sent to this single bus

I listened to your thing - that sounds pretty close too, the only thing I noticed is that the individual harmony bits are different than the original song but I think you mentioned this already. Yours almost sounds a little more lo-fi than mine (which is good!) Theres a free plugin I use from time to time called "Izotope Vinyl" and you can use it as an insert and make your track sound kind of lo fi or gritty.. Sometimes I use this if I want to get that lofi "tape bouncing" effect..
 
nddhc said:
I listened to your thing - that sounds pretty close too, the only thing I noticed is that the individual harmony bits are different than the original song but I think you mentioned this already.
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Yeah it's definately hard for me to make out what each harmony is when it comes to this type of thing. Same with Beach Boys and Queen. There's just so much going on, and it seems the harmonies are "dummed" down a bit so it's almost muffled or something. Hehe, I had no idea I was recording lo-fi stuff all this time, but hey that works for me :D

Some really good tips here, thanks for helping me out on getting to the sound that is E.L.O :) Are you trying to figure out any other bits?
 
I noticed today on Turn to Stone that the harmonies also have what seems to be a lot of bass voices in there. Almost sounds like a Gregorian Chant. I can't figure the notes out though, it's so muddled.
 
does anyone know of some good online articles/resources that explain some of the ELO recording techniques in general? i really love the drum sounds on a lot of the tunes.
 
Sloan said:
does anyone know of some good online articles/resources that explain some of the ELO recording techniques in general? i really love the drum sounds on a lot of the tunes.
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Sounds like they put flanger on the drums in a few songs ... songs like Twilight for instance. Perhaps a boost on the high-end of the EQ as well.
 
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