Obviously he's been too busy staring at the birds across the way, as Brandt, in his genius, totally skipped over our Memorial Day session at the studio, which was in fact the First Official Vocal Session (tm) of the album. Let's start with this: I love writing lyrics, I like coming up with melodies, but I hate singing. Hate it. If I had my way, HF would have its own singer, but the only man I feel to be worthy enough to be the HF frontman has his own band to worry about, but he occasionally graces us with a vocal or two when it counts. You may have read about him here before.
In the aggression, it was easier because you could get away with not being perfect because we would just slap distortion over it. Hypefactor, fortunately (or unfortunately) is different. Doing vocals with Brandt is a much different experience than working with Tom and Ash on FLOOD. Quite honestly, while I love the lads, recording the vocals for FLOOD with those two mo's was a horrible and frustating experience as they kept forcing on me what they wanted as opposed to making the most out of what I am capable of doing vocally (which isn't much to begin with, but hey, you try it).
Brandt, while often a slow-mo, has the know-how to get the best performance out of me. He understands my range and what I can and can't do. What I learned from the last HF CD was that I work best demoing my scratch vocals and then listening to them for a month or so before coming in to record the final tracks. This approach also helps me in places where I feel the lyrics might be weak. I always carry my little lyric book with me to jot down revisions, so when the time comes to record the final vox, I'm ready to go.
One final thing I thought was important to this process was my desire to record my vox against the real drums recorded for the album. Brandt has been editing the drums in bits and pieces, so if something had a real drum edited together, I focused on those first. I felt having the real drums to sing against would create the right emotion for each song as opposed to singing to loops. This went out the door somewhat when I started getting into the groove of things but lets see what happens when the drums are all in there.
Because a lot of prep has gone into the vocals BEFORE I step into Brandt's bathroom to record, we're able to hit the ground running and this past Monday was no exception. We started with CREATION PHASE, and were able to wrap that up very quickly over several hours. Brandt would record several tracks of me recording different things in different ways so we had the pick of the litter later on when mixing. With this track we had the new ending that Ash, B and I wrote and I was able to come up with something on the fly to add to ending. It's a short vocal passage, but perfect in terms of the song coming to it's conclusion. This one is a stormer.
After a long tea and biscuit break, We then tackled SOLAR, the album closer. This had partial drums but I got caught up in the song, so we laid down the whole song over the course of a few hours. Again the same approach of recording several different takes was applied. Also note, Brandt is a stickler for detail. If I fucked up a nuance of a vocal, I was ordered (in a nice way) to re-take it. This kid is determined to make this album as live and as real as possible and I think he just doesnt want to have sit and play with auto-tune for a month. Needless to say, i did my best and he didnt argue or make fun of me too much, though he keeps telling me to sing "More Gay" on the mushier songs like SOLAR.
Feeling the vibe, I asked him to roll THEME FROM PROPAGANDA, which isnt a song as much as it is the dance ceterpiece of the album. I originally wanted to leave it alone, but I had an idea to take an Undeworld-y approach to it, so we put a lof of effects on the vocal and I just improvd a bunch of random lyrics about clubs, coat checks, and assorted random BS that you hopefully not be able to make out when you hear the final song. I'm not sure what I did here, and I don't think B did either, but hey.
So we're off to a good start. B has already filled you in on our Spanish Language Experience (tm), which was scary and fun. Luckily, Leo did all the hard work in advance, so I just had to make sure I was pronouncing everything properly. This is a lot harder than it sounds, kids. Anyway, I'm very high on this track, OUR FAITH, and the album itself here in the late stages is evolving into something better than what I thought it could be a month ago.
There is still more work to be done, but luckily my next two songs, THE MORNING AFTER THE LIFE BEFORE, and ONE.NINE.FIVE.SIX are currently in the very capable musical hands of Brandt and Charles, respectively. Until they do their things on those tracks, I can't cut my vocals for those tracks, and I don't want to be in a position where I do vocals and then someone alters something musically in the song. In the meantime, I have to finish lyrics and verse melodies for DESCRIPTIVE. This will keep me occupied as I'm trying a whole new approach (for me) to lyric writing and vocal recording with this song. Brandt touches on it below, but I'll get further into it later on.
Special thanks to my man Bisquit for sending me the studio version of RevCo's CATTLE GRIND (hilarious)!
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