Trust me, if I could have committed those murders a decade before I was born, I would have. I’d KILL for that privilege. Come to think about it, I might have.
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Tony Visconti is just bitter because as co-producer he did more than people think.
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Adele is fantastically skilled, and a producer with an agenda to generate publicity for his project(s) has undeniably succeeded. And sadly, we are discussing it. Let’s be real, who had heard of Count Asshat before this?
I’m just going to sit here and fanboy, and say that If Adele had a dick, and told me to suck it. I would. With great enthusiasm.
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She was a lot nicer than I would’ve been.
I’m straight and I would, with enthusiasm
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May I ask your opinion of Lars von Trier’s oeuvre?
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Persona management is an art unto itself.
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Anyone possessing more than a passing familiarity with modern music of the past fifty years? He may not be as well-known to millennials as Adele is, but he’s hardly an obscure figure.
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My God. A celebrity said something mean about a celebrity?
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Well… A celebrity said something mean but not inaccurate about standard recording procedures these days, namechecked another celebrity in passing as to some degree a possible product of it, the headline writers [hi, @beschizza!] said “ZOMG HE MUST MEAN AUTOTUNE!!!” and we’re off to the races.
My audio days are behind me (I sincerely hope), and I only ever did a little live mixing anyway, so my ears are no better than anybody else’s. For what it’s worth I hear a nice warm natural mix, presumably a bit of beefing up on EQ which any engineer would do, and usually dry for the intimate verses with a deal of reverb on the belting choruses. No hint of autotune, which wouldn’t match her style at all anyway (but if it was done subtly enough, who but the engineer would know?). But my opinion isn’t worth a damn compared to Tom Elmhirst, the guy who mixed Adele’s recent recordings: Tony Visconti, or any of us, could have looked to see if he’s spoken about mixing Adele. He has:
What was the vocal chain you set up for Adele on “Hello?”
The chain in LA was the Neve 1066 (Mic pre/3-band EQ) to the Bluestripe UREI 1176 compressor into a Fairchild 660 limiter. I’m taking the multitrack return from Pro Tools to the line amp on the Neve 1066, then straight into the 1176 and 660 and back up the insert return.
The UREI is hitting and releasing quicker, while the Fairchild is doing a much slower attack and release. Here at Electric Lady I use a Neve 1081 into a Blackface 1176 and then into a Tube-Tech CL 1B compressor.
A large part of the vocal sound is the plates and chambers at Capitol Studios: There’s chambers that Les Paul built back in the 1940’s, and they are literally like nothing else on earth. When I got back to NY in September, I mixed five or six songs at Electric Lady, so we’d send the vocals from here and they’d record it through the chamber, and send back the prints.
Once you’ve found the vocal sound for someone like Adele, you want to use it through the whole record, and these plates and chambers sound incredible. To get to them is hard enough: you go in to the basement of Capitol, you then climb through a ladder to get to the sub-basement, where it looks like no one has been for 50 years. You literally open a hatch and climb down a steel ladder.
Have you ever been in a reverb chamber? They’re like tiled rooms, not painted – like Alice in Wonderland rooms, they don’t look right.
There’s a lot of effects going on behind the vocals. There’s an AMS delay, an Eventide preset called “Canyon,” a plate, a spring…You can see the escalation of things. There’s about seven or eight things going on. You get this wide kind of thing, but her vocal remains super-present.
I’ve learnt something from this, and maybe it’s a general principle worth remembering: to get such a marvellously natural sound, at some point somebody is going to have to open a hatch and climb down a steel ladder.
ETA there’s a nice irony that the “large part of [Adele’s] vocal sound” derives from Les Paul’s echo chambers, built maybe twenty years before Tony Visconti was producing David Bowie.
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So, “no true music fan”…
(let me break out my kilt then)
But, one has to admit that to a casual consumer of music (or perhaps “your average person off the street”) the difference in fame/brand recognition between the two is pretty large.
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