Get This Free Cheat Sheet Guaranteed To Help Your Next Mix

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Fleetwood Mac "Go Your Own Way" Isolated Vocals

It's Friday again and that means it's time for another isolated track. Today we'll listen to the isolated vocals from Fleetwood Mac's big hit "You Can Go Your Own Way, (this is a Spotify link)" the first single from the band's huge 1977 Rumours album. Here are some things to listen for (the track starts at 0:07).

1. Check out all the the breaths on the track. You can hear lead singer Lindsey Buckingham take a big breath of air before most vocal phrases, and the whole band before each harmony chorus. We'd probably delete these today in our DAW world.

2. There's a nice medium length delayed reverb on the vocals. There's more there than what you think is there when you listen with the instrumental track.

3. The lead vocal is at the top of the harmony stack, which is somewhat unusual.

4. The harmonies begin to get sloppy with the releases towards the end of the song at 3:30. You can hear all vocalists ending the phrases at different times, which doesn't happen earlier on.




3 comments:

Unknown said...

All of these "imperfections" actually make it awesome

Anonymous said...

This is great. Lots of country-sounding warble on the verses that it's easy to miss in the full mix. And yeah, those gulpy breaths...never noticed. Great song, great singer.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Steve. The imperfections, such as breaths and different harmony parts ending a little short here and there are what make these and all the records PRE "perfection" era sound so good. You can't delete a breath before a vocal line in real life, why would you do it in a DAW? The only reason to delete and insert silence in a DAW IMHO is to clean up pop's and cracks and other non musical entities. I've listened to this record over and over since it came out as a 12 year old and I've never heard anything jump as non musical or needing to be "cleaned" up. The life of Classic records is the realism of them. Slick, polished, perfectly timed records are like candy. Candy is great for a little bit, then it makes you sick. Classic records are like a well balanced diet of meat and vegetables with your favorite beverage. ;-) Digital records are fine by me, but the overuse of the tools within the digital real are sucking the life out of the music.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...