Great article on the Making of Parachutes/Interview with Ken Nelson

[Charlie17]

I just noticed peoples interest in some of the more technical side of things/sounds/production etc. This article from quite a few years ago in Sound on Sound is about as good as it gets to get a first hand account of what the process was like recording parachutes. I'm curious to know which word Ken Nelson auto-tuned on the album. Also interesting that Yellow was done with a click track in ProTools while the others were played live essentially. Ken Nelson also mentions that pump organ that seemed to be so omnipresent in coldplay's early stuff. acted almost like a synth pad. It's a great article, I'm sure anyone who loves Coldplay and records music or is interested in this type of stuff will like this article. Cheers,

 

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct00/articles/ken.htm

[Christa42]

Thanks for the article :)

[Charlie17]

Michael Brauer who's mentioned as the mix engineer, he did a few tracks on Viva la Vida and did this thing to Chris' vocal that people call "Brauerizing." He Basically runs a track, likely the lead vocal, which is exactly what he did on the lead vocal of "Violet Hill," through literally all of his outboard equipment (compressors mostly). He doesn't actually process the sound or compress anything, but just running the audio through these dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of tubes and transistors "colors" the sound in a subtle but interesting way. I personally think the vocal sound on Violet Hill, the only song I am positivity he used this little technique that no one without like a million $ of amazing gear can do, sounds really cool. It's not in anyway "cheating" like autotune or melodyne can be for people who can't sing in tune and can be artificially placed in pitch. Coloring the sound is one of the appeals of the real hardware vs. the software plugins and Brauer uses all the gear in a huge studio on Chris' vocal to color it, and it came out cool. The reverb sounds expensive too. Although he did use the Waves Renaissance De-Esser on that track which anyone with $30 to spare can obtain. De-essers aren't exactly sexy tools to work with though that's for sure.

[grids]

Interesting! Thanks for the article!

[Batman]

Michael Brauer who's mentioned as the mix engineer, he did a few tracks on Viva la Vida and did this thing to Chris' vocal that people call "Brauerizing." He Basically runs a track, likely the lead vocal, which is exactly what he did on the lead vocal of "Violet Hill," through literally all of his outboard equipment (compressors mostly). He doesn't actually process the sound or compress anything, but just running the audio through these dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of tubes and transistors "colors" the sound in a subtle but interesting way. I personally think the vocal sound on Violet Hill, the only song I am positivity he used this little technique that no one without like a million $ of amazing gear can do, sounds really cool. It's not in anyway "cheating" like autotune or melodyne can be for people who can't sing in tune and can be artificially placed in pitch. Coloring the sound is one of the appeals of the real hardware vs. the software plugins and Brauer uses all the gear in a huge studio on Chris' vocal to color it, and it came out cool. The reverb sounds expensive too. Although he did use the Waves Renaissance De-Esser on that track which anyone with $30 to spare can obtain. De-essers aren't exactly sexy tools to work with though that's for sure.

 

I've re-read your post for the fourth time now to fully understand it. I have absolutely no knowledge of any kind of gear/hardware/all that stuff you use in the music industry, but this here:

 

The reverb sounds expensive too

 

sounds so alien to me I just... :lol:

 

an example: "this artwork looks salty too"

 

 

 

:laugh3:

 

 

I love listening/reading things I don't know shit about. Makes me realise just how much knowledge is out there waiting to be learned :wacko:

[Jonny and the cake]

I dont know why but the production story of we never change made me really emotional

[Batman]

I dont know why but the production story of we never change made me really emotional

 

:uhoh:

 

I felt the same omg

[Charlie17]

I had to re-read what I wrote as well. Not because it doesn't technically make sense, but my sentences were like 90 words long. That's funny you thought the reverb comment was funny. Most recordings of songs and records these days are not done the way that Parachutes was. There are essentially two approaches to recording a band. When the band plays together and everything (drums, guitars, bass, piano, vocals, etc.) is recorded simultaneously, this is called recording "live." It used to be the norm in the music industry for various reasons, mainly because recording was done (like Parachutes was) with physical electromagnetic tape machines. and for everything to be recorded separately and then mixed together wouldn't have been realistic for a number of reasons. But since ProTools and computers have replaced physical tape as the way recordings are captured and stored, it's more common for each element of a song to be "tracked" separately. Layering the various instruments and sounds one by one. When someone records one part at a time, like I do because I'm a solo artist and I play each instrument, it's called over-dubbing. It makes it possible for a band like Coldplay to record a song without the band members even being in the same country.

Audio engineers also prefer this method, typically, because, it allows them to process each track in a song (an acoustic guitar for instance, or a vocal track) without "bleed" from other instruments. Recording live, has the issue of microphone bleed because if you think about it, while chris is playing and singing, the microphone he's singing into will also record his guitar, drums in the background, and whatever else is captured in his vocal mic. For a more modern approach, Chris would likely sing in a vocal booth that is acoustically very dead. If you've never been in one, they are weird little rooms. The second you stop making a sound, the room is utterly quiet almost instantly. Chris, or anyone recording in a vocal booth wears headphones while singing so that he can hear himself and the other instruments that have been recorded and sing along, but the headphones don't let the sound get recorded by his microphone. Reverb is a very common effect that would be applied afterwards to give the sense of "space" to his singing. Just think about the amount of time it takes for a loud noise to become completely quiet in a huge room or a really reflective room like a bathroom. Some reverb effects are expensive and use serious hardware, and some aren't expensive and use algorithms and software. It gets much more complicated than my explanation believe me. Things like pre-delays, early reflections, density...it's taken a musician like me who records his own stuff and made me feel like a physicist at times. I'll leave it there. But there's also compression, equalization, gating, delays, saturation, and all kinds of things done to make voices and instruments sound as good as possible and fit together in a song as well as possible. Sorry for the dissertation. :)