What effect creates that "Magic" touch?

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 8:30 pm

Greetings,
Can anyone tell what effect or processor is being used on the vocal track of Kelly Clarkson' "Because of you".
At the very beginning, where her vocal is the dominant element you can clearly hear this "silver coating" around her voice. I don't think, that is just an EQ trick, but I could not find out what that is.
Does anyone know?

-Eugene

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 12:34 am

Usually in pop music they use an effect call 'pop blows'

what that does is it makes trendy crap sound appealing to teeny-boppers...

Sorry, some of this S#!t just needs to stop being produced...

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:25 am

That's kind of an ignorant response.

Although I do agree her music does pop blow.

The effect might be used on other things.

Also, the person who asked might be trying to make a living and needs some help to produce a vocalist who wants a similar effect.

It would be a feather in his cap to be able to get what his client wants.

To some people this is a business.

To me it's fun.

I personally wish I knew just for the information.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 5:11 pm

studio-G wrote:

Greetings,
Can anyone tell what effect or processor is being used on the vocal track of Kelly Clarkson' "Because of you".
At the very beginning, where her vocal is the dominant element you can clearly hear this "silver coating" around her voice. I don't think, that is just an EQ trick, but I could not find out what that is.
Does anyone know?

-Eugene

I think what you are hearing is the result of highly productive and very experienced engineers. I didn't hear the "silver" but I did hear a very good reproduction of a womans singing voice.

Clearly as the music begins, doubling of some sort seems to broaden the voice in the mix. I didn't hear anything that stood out as any one single effect.

What I heard was quality technical ability on both sides of the mic being reproduced with the highest quality gear the pop genre has to throw at whatever is the hottest flavor of the day.

But to be fair and balanced as I often am, I may have been drinking,

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 5:52 pm

OK I just googled it and heard exactly what you are talking about.

It's as though they took away her sibilance from her voice and put a space between it and the rest of her voice.

How they did that is probably done after they corrected her pitch, which I hear.

Maybe try this, make 2 tracks of the vocals, with one cut off the sibilance completely with I'll guess a de-esser then use a doubler. Then on the second track remove most of the rest of her voice except the high mids and up. Use reverb to get some of that space between the two tracks and blend them.

That's what I would try......notice how her breathiness jumps out.

Whatever they did you can hear the space between her voice and the sibilance seems like an after thought added on. And you can hear the doubling for sure.

I'm sure they worked on many, many tracks and mixed them all down into one combined sound.

Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:57 am

Thanks bigdaddybluesman!
I was looking for a particular suggestions just like that one you have offered. Also, thanks to everyone else who took the time to participate in this discussion. I will try those things there were suggested and will share with you my impression of the outcome.

BTW, is the "pop blows" just a term that implies one's disliking of pop music or is is actually a particular technique?

Best regards,

-Eugene

Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:00 am

Hi...my name is Jeremy Cucco....and I like Kelly Clarkson....

Oops. Is this not Pop-aholics Anonymous?

Damn.

Okay, while I generally agree that pop sucks in general, I think that she's actually a decent artist. She obviously had to work to get where she is and display some kind of talent (albeit, not the kind I'm accustomed to working with...could you imagine Kelly Clarkson doing Nessun Dorma? Other than the fact that she's not a tenor??)

But back to the topic at hand.

I hear no doubling on this track at the opening vocals. What I do hear is the use of a microphone which has a clean sound and a nice HF lift at around 8 kHz. Perhaps a u87 or even better, a u47 or a Gefell UM92.1s going through a preamp with just a tad bit of bite in the upper mids...perhaps a Quad 8 or similar. I would also suspect that there has been some EQ lift applied at th 5kHz region to compliment the lower end of the mic's lift.

Also, she's likely standing in such a way that the mic is just slightly higher than her oral orafice (huh, huh...I just talked about Kelly Clarkson's oral orafice...) which sort of reinforces the breathy quality of a female vocalist.

In other words, I don't think there's any magic here, just good ole fashioned engineering. They wanted that sound, so they used the gear and the ears to get it.

Cheers -

J.

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:00 pm

funny. I have a real clean woman singer-friend. And took a regular recording of her, singing to her classic guitar....

OK. so i have 2 track of vocal (doubled). I route that to 1 group which i apply heavy HEAVY HEAVY!! compression and another to a group where i remove everything up to 3333Hz and then apply reverb to that.. And what do you know? I get this weird feeling of the voice singing to its self.

conclusion? I Feel i have found my pop-trick. Weird that i haven't tried this before Very Happy

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