datamusicata

Can I Use My Friends for Background Vocalists?

I recently worked in the studio with a client who wanted to do some big chorus stuff on one of his songs. He put together a six voice chorus to get a big sound. He also wanted the chorus to be friends that he had worked with even though they were at various levels of professionalism and experience. He was also working with a limited budget and consequently limited time in the studio.

As a recording artist with over twenty two releases, I know how wonderful it is to make music with your friends, but that isn’t always the most cost effective way to record. If you want to have your friends on the recording and they are not professional musicians, there are several things that you can do to make the most of your time, get the best results and to spend the least amount of your hard to come by dough.

First of all, pick the songs that you want the voices on. Secondly, listen yourself or with your producer and decide where you want the voices. Then sketch out an idea for all the parts. Then make copies of the song in a state that includes the chords, the rhythm and the lead vocal if possible, otherwise a vocal as close to the lead as you can get with the time that you have. Give each one of the people you are going to have in the studio a copy. Ask them to listen to it several times. Follow up with phone calls to ascertain that they have indeed listened to it. (When you are hiring professional background vocalists, it is still important to do all this stuff, tho the pro won’t need to listen more than once or twice and there will be no rehearsal with them unless you hire them to do that.).

After you have ascertained that everyone in your chorus has a copy that they have listened to many times, then schedule a rehearsal. And if you can swing it schedule several more rehearsals. If you’ve written the parts for everyone, then, you can do it individually, but eventually you will need to have them all in the room at once rehearsing.

I like to sketch out the parts, but leave it open for them to contribute, as other people are always going to think of things that you didn’t, and music really is all about collaboration. Rehearse them a few days out and then rehearse them the day before the session. What you don’t want to do is to be practicing and writing parts while the clock is ticking. Not unless you have a large recording budget. You can explain to your friends that their names are going to be on the recording and the more that they practice the better they will sound and that always leads to more work, notoriety and experience.

Unless your friends are really gifted, they are going to have a hard time blending their voices. When voices blend it is so rare and so magical that they usually win some fame and regard…think Crosby Stills & Nash, The Beatles, The Mamas and the Papas, etc. There are things that the engineer can do to help the voices blend, but there is nothing like the blend that comes from people actually singing the parts together simultaneously. However, that kind of blend takes a long time; lots of rehearsal and voices that know how to do that.

One of the tricks of blending is to add air to your voice. The harder you sing, the less air you bring to the sound and the harsher it is. The harsher it is, the more difficult it is to blend. Singing lead is different than singing background. A lead singer has to cut thru the band, a background singer supports the lead singer.

Let us talk for a moment more about what an engineer can do to help the vocals blend. The most obvious is to have all the singers sing each part in unison, so that you have a track of each part. It always sounds really good to have the part doubled, so we usually record two tracks to have a stereo background sound, so for three part harmony, you’d have six tracks of vocals, two unison for each part split left and right in stereo. Now the engineer can eq the individual tracks so that they blend with each other a little better. An engineer can also save a track that might have some squirrely intonation. When you have several voices and only one of them is singing off key, you can’t digitally retune that part, but you can take the part, send it into a stereo chorus unit, send the chorus unit into a stereo reverb and just bring the reverb back to surround the original squirrely part. You’d be amazed at how much you can fix intonation and blend with this little trick.

Another alternative is, if you want a particular friend on the track who’s intonation is not so reliable, then have them record solo and send their track into an auto tune device; fix the offending notes and blend their voice back in with the other voices. You can’t tell that it’s been done and you have made your friend and your listening audience happy.

But the big deal here is, with limited time and budget, you best show up at the studio so prepared that you can spend all your time there recording. That’s what you came for and that’s what you deserve to get.