Question about how PJ records

glorified jay

I was listening to an interview with My Morning Jacket last week, where they talked about recording as a live band for their albums. They also divulged that the singer also records the lead vocals with the band live for the album songs. The interviewer, Jian Ghomeshi, was blown away by this - stating that recording vocals with the band is almost unheard of. So, I've always understood that PJ records as a band live for the album tracks, but does Eddie also record his lead vocals in a similar fashion?

Thanks.

YetAnotherFiasco

Maybe for the first vocal track. If you listen to Avocado, Ed has at least 2 vocals on every track except Army Reserve and Wasted Reprise. And he usually sings in two different keys.

mccreadyisgod

In everything I've ever read about the recording process, they mention that the band records main parts together live (drums, bass, and main guitar riffs/chords). Then they overdub solos and leads, and then vocals. I also remember them talking about doing a number of songs where they record the instrumental stuff before Ed even writes lyrics to them.

If they have the lyrics written beforehand, or even just ideas that they are working with, I imagine they will record what's known as a "scratch track" vocal, where Ed sings along with the band, but they throw away that vocal recording and re-record it in isolation. The scratch vocal can be used by the rest of the band as a roadmap, and to solidify the performance, and also can be used during any overdubs for the same reason. Then you wrap with the properly-recorded vocal. This gives the advantage of being able to write and fine-tune lyrics after the instrumental tracks are finished.

It's definitely rare to record the main vocals live with the band, but it's not unheard of. Mostly, it's used by people trying to re-capture the sound or vibe of older recordings where the vocalist and band performed together in one take. What also happens a lot in modern recording is the vocalist is put in a closed-off room called a vocal booth, where they can see the rest of the band through windows, but the only sound in the room is the voice (singer monitors the rest of the band through headphones).

I've personally done recordings both ways, both as an engineer and as a performer, and there's no wrong way to do it. Recording vocals separately gives you the ability to finesse the lyrics and really perfect the vocal performance, down to the word or even syllable. Recording live, you lose the sonic isolation, but you often gain an emotion that is harder to recreate during an overdub. Then again, I've recorded whole songs where I didn't know what the song was about until we wrote words after recording the rest of the song.

YetAnotherFiasco

I believe I read somewhere that Neil Young did all of the Mirrorball vocals live with that band.

mfc2006

YetAnotherFiasco wrote:

I believe I read somewhere that Neil Young did all of the Mirrorball vocals live with that band.

i remember reading that as well.

and once again, mccreadyisgod nailed it. i couldn't have said it any better.