Help want my voice to sound like John Lennon Rubber Soul

So I guess I like the sound of a U47 except I've never heard a real one, I have however heard the Sound deluxe copy and was quite impressed, the mic sounded thick on the lows but with a cutting edge, except when I hit it hard it got pretty thin. So which one of these mic projects should I take on? G7, C800, Royer mod etc... also which capsule etc...

Opinions please.

G7.

The C800 is very clean.

I haven't tried the Mod.

Jakob E.

I recall a story where geoff said that they used a u-47 on everything I mean every instrument, every vocal, everything for that album.

I love the vocal sounds on those Beatles records. Geoff did a lot to give the vocals depth, and it involved more than just microphone selection.

Take a listen to those albums/CDs with headphones on and you'll realize that the vocals are often doubled (or more), and that they played a lot with miking techniques. Some of the vocals sound like they are recorded close up, with others being recorded with the mic further away. When they mixed it all together it created a big vocal sound.

Don't expect to get that sound with single mono track. Maybe someone else who knows more could comment on their recording techniques.

We hada big discussion on this at Stephen Paul's forum a while back, but it got taken down by some ...... oh never mind.

There was a lot of bouncing of tracks on less than stellar tape which required some manipulation to un muddy the tracks and get them up front. A lot of other weird details that I can't remember. Four track machines force you to bounce tracks.

less than stellar tape? didnt EMI have a policy of single pass only, never recording over anything...

Im pretty sure what you are looking for is not a mic but john lennon.

sorry, had to say it.

dave

Tape technology is a lot better today than it was back then.
I forget the name of that crap they had to use. Had a certain smell.
:?:

[quote author="soundguy"]

Im pretty sure what you are looking for is not a mic but john lennon.

sorry, had to say it.

dave[/quote]

I was actually waiting for that.

From what I've read in interviews Geoff ran just about everything through a Fairchild... so there's that as well.

the relevancy of tape technology is a good debate for sure. I think its somewhat of a non-issue as half the shit we fiend after is fiended after because of sound recorded on tape that people have claimed was terrible. Thats kind of a contradiction if you ask me. To really spin this out into the esoteric, its almost certain that back then they were recording at 185nw/m. While Im sure it would have been a fanciful item for any engineer back then, how logical is it to compare 185nw/m stocks with 500nw/m stocks which is surely what that debate is all about. The real question here is what the engineers of the day were able to do with the tape stocks and listening to those records, Id say they figured out a way to make a swell sounding recording with the tools they had available. When you look at the remixed version of Let It Be, that tape and the recording techniques captured on it turned out to be archival as all hell, and even if there was restoration necessary, the tapes were usable and IMO sound great. In 20 years if people go to play back their 500n/w tapes recorded with the needle bent to conform to some fad promoted by a tape manufacturer and a recording industry, what is going to happen to the high end on those tapes? Sure the fulx is way up and techincally its a better tape than what they had in the stone age, but the way people slam the stuff at +9 (!!) there's gonna be serious high end degradation down the line. So, we may currently have a better stock available to us today, but what are people doing with it? Its that same old thing, are you looking at it on a scope or listening to it coming out of a speaker? How many people recording today chose the sound of a +9 stock recorded at 500nw/m over the sound of whatever the beatles and the rest of the world was using at 0 and 185nw/m. It gets esoteric quick when you look at it in those terms, I think. To be thorough, its probably worth noting that they recorded with CCIR eq's which is a whole world of difference if you are used to NAB.

holy thread hijack, sorry.

rich, btw, if you are looking to listen to another reference, the lawson 47 copy is really cool, its similar to the soundelux, but doesnt have that way upper mid bump (the "edge") and it doesnt flatten out when pushed, its more "furrrier" sounding and generally more "blanketed" sounding all around when compared to the soundelux which is sorta woolier but clearer at the same time. Also, some of the rubber soul stuff has some c12 flavor to it, be it a c12 or an eq is anyone's guess.

dave

The stuff I am talking about is related to the first two or three albums. The post I started at Stephen's forum was titled High End Fizz. If you listen to the vinyl from back then, you can hear a distinct distortion/fizz to Lennon's vocals. Anyway, it took Stephen weeks to respond, as was customary for his posts. But the guy new the recording process used on those albums inside and out, and he laid it all out.
There were about twenty reasons for what I was hearing. and I wish I could remember them all because they were very interesting. All the way from tape used, what order they bounced tracks in, level of the vocals, equipment used, equipmemt mods, microphones, Lennon's vocal style compared to Paul's, what they were smoking, what they were drinking, on and on. It was very facinating to say the least. I think Stephen even had some original tapes from back then. How he got them, I do not know.
I think I remember something like a vocal guide track was recorded with the instruments, so that as the instruments were bounced, the vocalist had something to guide them during overdubs, and on some of those old tracks, you can even hear some faint vocal guide tracks left over.
On the stuff where the vocals were done at the same time as the instruments, by the time the instrument tracks got bounced three million times, the vocals were beat to death, so they had to go over them. And the interaction of the overdubs with the guide tracks were causing some problems. If they was no high end left by the time they starting compressing the hell out of the tape, then the dynamics really were lost, so they jacked up the treble a lot on the vocals.
Also, since George had to bounce tracks before the vocals could be overdubbed, there was a lot of time where the boys were just sitting around doing nothing and getting pissed. So I think they developed a deal where they could do the over dubbing on a different machine while George was doing his thing with the bouncing. They would use a tracking tape as a guide for the vocal overdubs. Then, the guys could go home while George combined the overdubs with the bounced instruments.
And then there are issues like lag time from the playback head to the record head, studers getting speeded up from their original speed, etc.

There are a couple of cool books on this. All You Need Is Ears by George is pretty cool. I can't remember the names of the other books.

I remember something else. When they would record the overdubs with the guide tracks, THEY DIDN'T USE HEADPHONES! They would blast the guide track through this big black mono speaker becuase their ears were so shot by the time that they finished tracking the instruments. This meant that they really had to shout like a mutha to keep the guide track from bleeding into the vocal tracks. But there would still be a little guide track that you could hear, so they really had to sync up those tape machines.

a lot of that sounds like a bunch of lore to me but Im willing to believe it, if any of those posts ever show up in an archive Id love to read it. It woudl be pretty intense if they were doing overdubs on one machine and then synching with 50hz to slave the backing tracks to bounce to a third machine. Something tells me that if they were doing that, those records would have been slightly more elaborate then they are as your bounce in that case could be 8 tracks plus whatever you could do live against it. Over the first few records, I dont think the beatles themselves or george martin as the head of parlophone could have put the screws in to get the technology going just because some guys were bored, but anything is possible. Id love to read that discussion, shame its not there... 50 hz sync in retrospect isnt the biggest deal, the whole film industry ran on it at the time seems like that would have come a little further down the line though, those records just dont sound like they had that at their finger tips. If they did, its potential was poorly realized.

dave

Hmmm...

From what I have read (going back to Mark Lewishon's 1988 book), the first two albums Please Please Me and With The Beatles were pretty much done live to two-track IIRC. The first time the boys used the J37 was on "Hold Your Hand", again IIRC, October 1963.

As far as I know, they never really bounced a whole lot until later, maybe around Help!/Rubber Soul at the earliest and definitely by Revolver/Sgt. Pepper. I mean, IMO there'd be no reason some song like I Feel Fine would need to be bounced a whole lot. And that one I believe had no guide vocal during its making (I've been collecting the boots for over 15 years and never heard an outtake with the guide, but anything is possble, I mean I wasn't there :green: ). I could be wrong about this, but a lot of their work flow like this is chronicled in Lewisohn's book...

Just my $0.02

soundguy post about tape (insert here)

Click to expand...

IMHO there is not really a difference between current tape stock and old tape stock for the simple fact that If you record on TAPE DESIGNED FOR +9 AT +9 YOU STILL HAVE THAT 3% THD which back in the day tape designed to be a 0/185 AKA ampex had 3% THD. So even though we are recording hotter you still have the same specs. I prefer to do a +6 on tape designed for +9 so I have less THD.

what you obviously already know..

John insisted on having a double track done on almost everything he sang.
ADT (artificial double track) was more or less invented for him and is nothing more then a +/- 50 msec delay and a big part of the typical John Lennon sound.
Don't know enough Rubber Soul to confirm if it was already there too...

Whatever mic, ADT is a must go

I thought Ken Townsend said ADT was first used/"invented" for Revolver?

Fun fact: Lennon referred to it as "Ken's flanger"

you're probably right but no doubt,
they dubbed vocals to get that sound

Yeah, you're right. Lennon did track his vocals from early on (third LP), manually, but hated the extra work. Hence ADTs invention.

Well I have never tried to get a "revolver " sound but I can tell you that ADT used to thicken a track recorded with reverb and EQ to cut lows and boost at about 3-4 KHz has that sort of sound.
CJ
BTW the stuff they used with the funny smell was grass.
Steve