LazerBeakShiek
Well-known member
Hey man, I m in about 15minutes..When does he talk about the harmony emulator tracks?
There are a lot of old albums like this. I would like the people to come out and say how they did it. The tracks are complex and technical enough.I love listening to that stuff.
No it wasn't. Bruce Swedien didn't fool with the Vocals as much as you think. Things would happen - i.e. happy accidents - but for the most part he's got an SM7a on the front vocals and a U67/U47 on the back grounds - a Harrison console - and they had 2 or 3 snyc'd 24 tracks. The magic was when Swedien mixed - it was a process and he was brilliant at it.I am at least 50 % sure it is synthetic or edited.
This. His control is really amazing. He's very aggressive with every syllable in the main vocal. Check out the power and accuracy in "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it's fair." There's some doubling on the chorus intro (Beat it! Beat it!), some harmony background, and an improv track or two that picks up at the end. Sounds like a plate reverb with a little more on the background vocals than the main vocal. If you can sing like that, a medium or large diaphragm dynamic microphone and a fast compressor should get you most of the way there.I've listened to the isolated tracks, and the harmonies are definitely separate performances. Vocorders don't just do robot voices, they are also used for modulation effects and there are a bunch of those on those songs. There is also something following the bass line on Billie Jean that could be a vocorder.
I don't hear anything in the vocal harmonies that MJ couldn't easily hit and we can tell from the unison parts that he can certainly sing really tightly with himself. There is no need for synthetic harmony tracks.