Is Fallout Boy Auto Tuned
Oleta Blaylock
Although 'Somebody That I Used To Know' was mixed 'in the box' at Franois Ttaz's Moose Mastering, several of the other tracks on Making Mirrors were mixed at Andy Stewart's The Mill studio. From left: Andy Stewart, Franois Ttaz and Wally 'Gotye' de Backer.Photo: Alain Bouvier
We're only halfway into 2012 and Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used To Know' already looks set to become the biggest hit single of the year. Like the song itself, which remains understated until the dramatic entrance of the first chorus a minute and a half in, its worldwide success took a while to happen. Though it was released in July 2011, it only reached the US number one spot on April 18th this year. By early May, the song had sold five million copies worldwide, had topped the charts in 18 countries, including the UK, where it spent a total of five weeks at the top to become the biggest-selling single of the year, gone nine times platinum in Gotye's native Australia, and been declared the most popular song in the 47-year history of the Dutch charts, while the video had clocked up 200 million views on YouTube. The album from which it was taken, Making Mirrors, has also reached the higher echelons of the charts in many countries.
Its success is particularly striking because the song breaks virtually every directive of today's hit-making rule-book. The first and second verses are whisper-quiet, the double chorus appears only twice in the whole song, the arrangement doesn't strive to create grand entrances or bombard the listener with hooks, and there's no rapping.
The song's mixer, Franois Ttaz, had a vision for it from the beginning. He also thought long and hard about aspects of the mix that are likely to have greatly contributed to its appeal, like the way in which the dynamics of the song are shaped, with the intensity increasing at several points, his refusal to engage with the loudness wars, the imperfections that he retained in the vocals, and the way he managed to make the track sound modern without losing the idiosyncratic character of the many lo-fi ingredients of Gotye's arrangement. Ttaz was and is inspired by two books written by neuroscientists, This Is Your Brain On Music by Dr Daniel Levitin and Sweet Anticipation: Music And The Psychology Of Expectation by professor David Huron (both published in 2006). His main focus, and that of Gotye (who was assisting him with mixing the entire album), was on feeling.
A very short Luiz Bonfa acoustic guitar sample provided the first spark; de Backer then constructed the entire arrangement as a gigantic sample collage, partly using extensively manipulated one-note samples from vinyl records and other sources, and partly sampling himself playing individual notes on various instruments. The vast majority of Making Mirrors was programmed and recorded by de Backer in Ableton Live and Pro Tools at his own studio in a shed at his parent's property, called The Barn and located one and a half hours from Melbourne. Some additional recordings took place at other locations, engineered by Ttaz, who also has an additional production credit on five of the album's 12 songs. Finishing 'Somebody' proved immensely frustrating, a problem compounded by elaborate scheduling problems in getting Kimbra to sing her part. The end result meant, however, that Ttaz and De Backer had some wonderful material to work with in the mix.
Seven songs, including 'Somebody I Used To Know', were mixed 'in the box' at Ttaz's all-digital studio, Moose Mastering, while the remaining five were mixed on a board at The Mill, a mostly analogue studio owned by Andy Stewart, who mixed 'Giving Me A Chance' and assisted Ttaz and De Backer on the four other songs mixed at The Mill.
Ttaz's relationship with de Backer began with Gotye's second album and Australian breakthrough, Like Drawing Blood, on which Ttaz is credited with additional production, mixing and mastering. "I work best as Wally's sounding board. He plays me stuff and I suggest anything that comes to mind, which is kind of like a production role. In my opinion, Wally is at his strongest with the Gotye project when he has his hands all over it and does things by himself, as was the case with Making Mirrors. Though Wally may well disagree! The way he approaches things when it's just him is what makes his music so special. It's very idiosyncratic. I just bounce off ideas with him, suggesting that this or that could be better or maybe he should try so and so, but generally I don't get hands-on during writing and arranging. I know he finds it frustrating sometimes, because working by himself can be very lonely, but I think it's the fact that he has to grapple with all the different challenges that makes what he does special.
"The way the song is constructed and my mix have a lot to do with sound placement and the tension and release narrative of the song. In terms of placement, when I was a teenager in the 1980s I was a massive fan of Trevor Horn. His pop productions, like Grace Jones' 'Slave To The Rhythm' and Frankie Goes To Hollywood really grabbed me. I also listened to dub music and musique concrte at the time, and what all these had in common was the emotion and drama of spatial relationships, whether from small or large spaces. The same with Phil Spector, Lee Hazlewood and Beatles records. They all worked with the dynamics of space and the textures of sounds and distortion, the places where things fit and the emotional qualities this gave. This is a very important element for me in terms of communicating the central idea of a song, and setting it in the drama of space.
"Of course a song has to have hooks and changes and melodies and bits and pieces, but really it is about you wanting to be thrilled when listening, and wanting to be fulfilled on many different levels, and being grabbed emotionally when listening multiple times. The difference between songs, and genres, is mostly about intent and timbre, in the texture of a voice, in the instrumentation and in the production overall. The reason why engineers and producers use a particular console, microphone, preamp or compressor, as well as make spatial/reverb decisions, is essentially to do with overall sonic texture and musical intent. But so much music today is just noise: you can't actually hear the vocals and the dynamic shifts between the verses and choruses and so on. Modern mixes often are in your face all the time, which means that I may go 'Wow!' on first listen, but on second listen I already get annoyed, because the song doesn't take me on a journey or play with my expectations. People put a lot of effort into making the beginning of the track great, so it has immediate impact, but when it gets to the chorus, or anywhere else where it needs a dynamic shift, they have run out of headroom. By the time the song gets to the chorus, it actually often gets softer, because hitting compression is the only tool the mixer has left to reach for. I do the same when I make decisions based on fear rather than musicality.
"When I mix, I always make sure that the vocal performances and edits are top-notch before I do anything else. Wally comped his vocals himself, and he'd then bring them to me and I'd finesse his edits: this is one area where I'm really finicky. Once I was happy with the vocals, I began work on the Luiz Bonfa nylon guitar sample. It has vinyl crackle, which Wally left for the first phrases and after that removed. The first few bars give you the impression of listening to a record, and for the rest of the track these noises are not there. I treated the nylon guitar with the Waves Renaissance EQ, and the Waves C4 multi-band compressor, which is expanding the mid-range and the top end. I copied the nylon guitar for the choruses [to the track named 'NylGDrive'] and added the Digidesign Smack compressor and the McDSP Compressor Bank to give it extra drive and power. It's very much a feel thing. The Compressor Bank is actually being triggered by the kick [track] just above the nylon guitar, and applies hardcore compression, completely smashing the sound, with the phrasing of the kick drum pumping it. It's one of these things that give you a feeling of depth in the track.
The plug-in chain for Kimbra's vocal section employed many of the same plug-ins as for Gotye's, but with the addition of an SSL bus compressor."'BscVerse' is the bass guitar, played by Lucas Taranto. I felt that the track needed a little bit more bottom end, so Lucas overdubbed a bass part. It had the crap edited out of it and I compressed with the Bomb Factory BF76, so it sat with the sample. Below that is the 'BassWithDrive' track, which has distortion on it from the Sonnox Oxford Transient Modulator. It enters at the beginning of the first chorus, at the same time as the kick and the 'LowGuitar' duplicate. The kick has a 12dB boost at 55Hz and 18dB at 5kHz with the Renaissance, which is my go-to EQ, plus it's gated with the Drawmer Dynamics Expander and it has the Compressor Bank, all for it to have a huge thump in the bottom end. The low guitar has some minor EQ from the Renaissance and has been doubled with the bass, plus I added a Digirack Delay to give it some depth and to give the bottom end some spread. All this low end was to support Wally's voice, which goes quite high in the chorus, and if it didn't have the support of the bass, it could easily sound a bit thin and screechy. His voice needed some real low-end power below it at that point.
"The 'chucks' guitar sample ['ChckDrive', playing a G-F-F note sequence] below the 'NylonGuitarDrive' track also supports Wally's voice in the chorus. Wally created two 'chuck' guitar tracks, one dry ['ChckDr101'] and one with reverb ['Chcks-Wt01'], and the dry one has quite a big pre-delay on it, plus a [Waves] Renaissance compressor with a really fast attack and a Renaissance EQ with a 10dB boost at 1.3kHz for a bit of mid-range poke. The 'ChckDrive' guitar for the choruses has all the lower-mid taken out with a huge cut at 300Hz using the Renaissance EQ, and I added a short stereo delay to brighten and widen it. As the chorus goes on, this guitar becomes brighter and wider, giving the chorus a very subtle lift.
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