Recording Vocals: Joséphine
Thursday night the 25th, Dave, André, & I walked down to Studio 101, warmed up the tubes and recorded a mass of vocals for Joséphine.
Welcome to Room 101
When we first wrote and recorded Joséphine in 2007, the vocals seemed pretty easy. At least that was my memory of the session. However, we wanted to re-record them because:
- I wanted consistency to the sound (the chorus and bridge were recorded on one day, the verses were recorded 8 months later).
- We wanted a better sound (we had originally used a Sennheiser 835 back on the original session).
- On the first demo that we made I had a cold.
We originally recorded the demo of the song for ourselves and intended to re-record the entire song as a later point. However, there are elements of that first demo that either aren’t reproducible or more accurately: shouldn’t be messed with. Whatever we did, we had to bring over certain aspects of that original recording. That first demo captured lightning in a bottle in some respects and all of us love it because it was a watershed moment for this group.
Joséphine was the first song that we wrote as an exercise or attempt to write together. The process was organic and effortless and everyone’s ideas were great and we were excited about what it was sounding like while we were recording it. When we were done recording the first demo we were thrilled and that helped fuel new songs and ideas that we were able to continue to build on when writing and producing.
I had forgotten that can be a pretty difficult song to sing in that there are many different parts of the song that require different types of vocal inflection. One moment I might be singing quietly and trying to get a breathless sound and the next moment I am singing full voice. It’s not the type of song where I can just set up a mic and go for it.
For the first part of the session I was singing it correctly in that I was (mostly) hitting all of the notes correctly, but there was real emotion coming through my voice. I was singing as best I could, but it was sounding lifeless.
Two things happened that opened up the session for us that night. The first one is fairly obvious: the more I sang the warmer my voice got and the easier it was for me to transition between notes and gain greater control over my voice. The second one was a bit of brilliance on Dave’s part.
Just when things were bogging down, Dave stopped everything and asked me to: “sing the chorus like William Shatner”. I had a blast trying to emote in my best over-the-top Captain Kirk/Transformed Man delivery.
“Come…to me……….Joséphine”
That broke the ice and the next take was a keeper.
