What is this singing style (if anything)?
April 24, 2022 10:24 AM Subscribe
When Gregory Alan Isakov sings many of his songs, it sounds to me like his voice is just floating out rather than being actively sung. Are there any other artists like this and does this style have a name or characterization? Thank you!
I am not a great expert in recording techniques, and perhaps some people who are will weigh in.
But it very much seems like he is singing in a very quiet and relaxed way, but miked very close, and then it is boosted rather high in the mix.
It's the kind of thing you can't do without microphones and amplification. If he were singing like this even with just an acoustic guitar, my guess is his voice would sound very quiet and rather overshadowed by the guitar.
So it captures a lot of the close-in nuances of very soft speech or singing - the kinds of things you just can't do if you are singing and projecting unamplified to a large room. But thanks to the miracle of mixing, it still sounds out clearly above all the other instruments.
I don't know if there is a specific names for this, but a number of recording artists sing in this kind of range. You'll hear vocal fry and other nuances come through - the kinds of intimate sounds that usually don't come through in a large hall, even with amplification.
posted by flug at 11:25 AM on April 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
But it very much seems like he is singing in a very quiet and relaxed way, but miked very close, and then it is boosted rather high in the mix.
It's the kind of thing you can't do without microphones and amplification. If he were singing like this even with just an acoustic guitar, my guess is his voice would sound very quiet and rather overshadowed by the guitar.
So it captures a lot of the close-in nuances of very soft speech or singing - the kinds of things you just can't do if you are singing and projecting unamplified to a large room. But thanks to the miracle of mixing, it still sounds out clearly above all the other instruments.
I don't know if there is a specific names for this, but a number of recording artists sing in this kind of range. You'll hear vocal fry and other nuances come through - the kinds of intimate sounds that usually don't come through in a large hall, even with amplification.
posted by flug at 11:25 AM on April 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
Suzanne Vega
Lorde
Feist
Nick Drake
Muse
Coldplay
Radiohead
Wild Strawberries
Carla Bruni
Morcheeba
Portishead
Sebastian Yatra
I would describe this vocal style as “intimate” and “close to the mic”.
If you like this feeling you may be the ideal audience for ASMR videos - soft recordings that give some listeners a tingly relaxing feeling. Search YouTube, there are thousands of videos where people speak in this kind of soft floaty crackly tone.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:36 AM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
Lorde
Feist
Nick Drake
Muse
Coldplay
Radiohead
Wild Strawberries
Carla Bruni
Morcheeba
Portishead
Sebastian Yatra
I would describe this vocal style as “intimate” and “close to the mic”.
If you like this feeling you may be the ideal audience for ASMR videos - soft recordings that give some listeners a tingly relaxing feeling. Search YouTube, there are thousands of videos where people speak in this kind of soft floaty crackly tone.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:36 AM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
Scott Walker, maybe?
Farmer in the City
Much of Scott 3 and all of Scott 4.
But he's been doing it since the 60s with The Walker Brothers.
posted by dobbs at 11:58 AM on April 24, 2022
Farmer in the City
Much of Scott 3 and all of Scott 4.
But he's been doing it since the 60s with The Walker Brothers.
posted by dobbs at 11:58 AM on April 24, 2022
I feel like this languid, legato vocal style goes back quite a ways in the 20th Century, Tim Hardin and Nick Drake come to mind, but also Cat Power, maybe Stina Nordenstam, Idaho, and a quantity of late 90s-2000s indierock/folk (a certain segment I've been known to call "Vassar Rock"). On preview, "crooner" is definitely in the mix. Bing Crosby might not have had a career if amplified microphones hadn't been invented in his time.
posted by rhizome at 12:04 PM on April 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by rhizome at 12:04 PM on April 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
m. ward
Iron&Wine
Sufjan Stevens
Chris Staples
seconding andrew bird
posted by umbú at 7:23 AM on April 25, 2022
Iron&Wine
Sufjan Stevens
Chris Staples
seconding andrew bird
posted by umbú at 7:23 AM on April 25, 2022
I don't know if the singing style has a name; it just sounds like indie folk to me, and the rest of the arrangement is pretty standard indie folk as well. But it's definitely close-miked, pretty dry (no reverb or studio effects), and it doesn't sound like he's either singing particularly loudly or enunciating particularly hard.
I was actually thinking about this last night - unless you listen to isolated vocal tracks, it's easy to overlook how hard most singers are actually singing. This is why so many amateurs are "bad" singers. They're just kind of going with the flow, whereas the actual singer on record is really popping their consonants at the top of their lungs. I first realized this listening to Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", of all songs.* Listen to the line "I'm not afraid anymore" leading into the second chorus on an isolated vocal track. She's really working hard there. No offense to indie folk singers, but they are not singing that hard.
Of course, if you do listen to an isolated vocal track of Belinda Carlisle, her enunciation is almost certainly not the first thing you'll notice. Her voice, like a lot of pop and rock singers' voices, is extremely processed. Yeah, it was the 80s, but listen to some artists who were supposed to be reactions against 80s overproduction, and you hear the same thing. Kurt Cobain's voice on Nevermind is highly processed as well, and there are Youtube videos of Butch Vig demonstrating exactly how he processed it.
To me, as someone who had never heard Gregory Alan Isakov before looking him up to see if I could answer this question, that's what stands out to me about his vocal tracks more than anything else. It's not the singing (although, like I said, there is something distinctive there); it's the production. And that's consistent with the indie folk style as well, which is why other commenters are reaching back to people like Nick Drake, one of the major influences on the genre.
The comment about Bing Crosby is not exactly what you're looking for, but if you're interested in going down a rabbit hole, yeah, the story of how Bing Crosby adapted his vocals for microphones is pretty interesting.
*I listen to this song a lot, actually. I enjoy listening to songs with the word "heaven" in the title and, while singing along, replacing the word "heaven" with "Kevin", my first name. "Just Like Kevin" by the Cure is probably the best example of this.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:29 AM on April 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
I was actually thinking about this last night - unless you listen to isolated vocal tracks, it's easy to overlook how hard most singers are actually singing. This is why so many amateurs are "bad" singers. They're just kind of going with the flow, whereas the actual singer on record is really popping their consonants at the top of their lungs. I first realized this listening to Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", of all songs.* Listen to the line "I'm not afraid anymore" leading into the second chorus on an isolated vocal track. She's really working hard there. No offense to indie folk singers, but they are not singing that hard.
Of course, if you do listen to an isolated vocal track of Belinda Carlisle, her enunciation is almost certainly not the first thing you'll notice. Her voice, like a lot of pop and rock singers' voices, is extremely processed. Yeah, it was the 80s, but listen to some artists who were supposed to be reactions against 80s overproduction, and you hear the same thing. Kurt Cobain's voice on Nevermind is highly processed as well, and there are Youtube videos of Butch Vig demonstrating exactly how he processed it.
To me, as someone who had never heard Gregory Alan Isakov before looking him up to see if I could answer this question, that's what stands out to me about his vocal tracks more than anything else. It's not the singing (although, like I said, there is something distinctive there); it's the production. And that's consistent with the indie folk style as well, which is why other commenters are reaching back to people like Nick Drake, one of the major influences on the genre.
The comment about Bing Crosby is not exactly what you're looking for, but if you're interested in going down a rabbit hole, yeah, the story of how Bing Crosby adapted his vocals for microphones is pretty interesting.
*I listen to this song a lot, actually. I enjoy listening to songs with the word "heaven" in the title and, while singing along, replacing the word "heaven" with "Kevin", my first name. "Just Like Kevin" by the Cure is probably the best example of this.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:29 AM on April 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
Ocie Elliott - Fame
Ray LaMontagne - Can I stay
The Japanese House - Somebody you found
Ghostly Kisses - Stay
posted by ljesse at 7:33 AM on April 25, 2022
Ray LaMontagne - Can I stay
The Japanese House - Somebody you found
Ghostly Kisses - Stay
posted by ljesse at 7:33 AM on April 25, 2022
Mac Demarco
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 7:36 AM on April 25, 2022
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 7:36 AM on April 25, 2022
And going back further, cool jazz and bossa nova singers are key to this style, like:
joão gilberto
astrud gilberto
tom jobim
chet baker
Elliott Smith was a bridge between generations, in that he was openly interested in bossa singing. His band heatmiser has a song called tom jobim.
posted by umbú at 7:36 AM on April 25, 2022
joão gilberto
astrud gilberto
tom jobim
chet baker
Elliott Smith was a bridge between generations, in that he was openly interested in bossa singing. His band heatmiser has a song called tom jobim.
posted by umbú at 7:36 AM on April 25, 2022
The close mic gets the intimate feel, and as other people have noted, he's not singing hard.
Most of the time, the vocals have doubling and/or harmonies (which do have reverb on them) low in the mix, which makes it sound a lot fuller. Compare the vocal sound of a song like San Luis to the vocals at the beginning of Salt and the Sea. The layered vocals are a big part of the sound I associate with him.
The mixes are be centered around the vocals with not too much that competes in the main male vocal frequencies. The guitar, at least while he's singing, is lower in the mix than might be normal. At least some of the time it sounds like there's either a mild low pass filtering taking some of the high frequencies off of it or that they're using a ribbon microphone that never picks them up in the first place (this article mentions using the Royer 122, which is a ribbon, along with a Neuman U87), so it's less prominent in the mix. The other three main instruments I associate with his sound is the bass, which is lower than his voice, and the snare and banjo, both of which are higher than it. This gives a lot of room spectrally to center around it.
Philip Parker, who played on some of the albums, popped up in a gear discussion. The vocal mic he mentioned is one of the variants of the U47, which is one of the all time greatest mics that has been used on thousands of the recordings you've heard. The 4038 is a classic ribbon mic and the 582 an KM69s are vintage high quality condenser mics. The main reverb unit he mentions is a high end one known for being a little unique and flattering to vocals. You can hear a demo here.
There's either a bunch of room mic or reverb on the drums (I'm on lousy computer speakers at the moment and can't say for sure), which also adds to the feeling of space in the mix, compared to a close mic sound.
Substantially different but you might also enjoy Lord Huron.
posted by Candleman at 9:40 AM on April 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Most of the time, the vocals have doubling and/or harmonies (which do have reverb on them) low in the mix, which makes it sound a lot fuller. Compare the vocal sound of a song like San Luis to the vocals at the beginning of Salt and the Sea. The layered vocals are a big part of the sound I associate with him.
The mixes are be centered around the vocals with not too much that competes in the main male vocal frequencies. The guitar, at least while he's singing, is lower in the mix than might be normal. At least some of the time it sounds like there's either a mild low pass filtering taking some of the high frequencies off of it or that they're using a ribbon microphone that never picks them up in the first place (this article mentions using the Royer 122, which is a ribbon, along with a Neuman U87), so it's less prominent in the mix. The other three main instruments I associate with his sound is the bass, which is lower than his voice, and the snare and banjo, both of which are higher than it. This gives a lot of room spectrally to center around it.
Philip Parker, who played on some of the albums, popped up in a gear discussion. The vocal mic he mentioned is one of the variants of the U47, which is one of the all time greatest mics that has been used on thousands of the recordings you've heard. The 4038 is a classic ribbon mic and the 582 an KM69s are vintage high quality condenser mics. The main reverb unit he mentions is a high end one known for being a little unique and flattering to vocals. You can hear a demo here.
There's either a bunch of room mic or reverb on the drums (I'm on lousy computer speakers at the moment and can't say for sure), which also adds to the feeling of space in the mix, compared to a close mic sound.
Substantially different but you might also enjoy Lord Huron.
posted by Candleman at 9:40 AM on April 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
I enjoy listening to songs with the word "heaven" in the title and, while singing along, replacing the word "heaven" with "Kevin", my first name.
Maybe for fun you could play the opposite direction and replace Kevin with Heaven.
Caamp is like this too. I too would just describe it as 'indie with acoustic folk guitar' as a sub-genre.
Here's a Seawolf song that is nothing like it sonically, ie: he sings with noticeable processing and very deliberately.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:55 AM on April 25, 2022
Maybe for fun you could play the opposite direction and replace Kevin with Heaven.
Caamp is like this too. I too would just describe it as 'indie with acoustic folk guitar' as a sub-genre.
Here's a Seawolf song that is nothing like it sonically, ie: he sings with noticeable processing and very deliberately.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:55 AM on April 25, 2022
« Older Unmixing Business with Pleasure - Cell Edition | What to do for 17 months between a BA and MLIS? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
Sea Wolf, Black Leaf Falls
Sea Wolf, Leaves in the River
Iron and Wine, Autumn Town Leaves
Iron and Wine, Upward Over the Mountain
Andrew Bird, Tenuousness
Mazzy Star, Flowers in December
posted by Glinn at 11:08 AM on April 24, 2022