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RSR045 – Roger Alan Nichols - Recording Vocals With Steven Tyler

Cutting Vocals With Steven Tyler

Steven Tyler is just this spinning top of energy. He’s everything that you would imagine him to be. But here’s the thing that's really amazing, is to first of all be in your room and hear his vocals coming out through your speakers, and to look through the glass to see him standing behind your U47. You go, “Woah that’s Steven Tyler!” it’s pretty remarkable.

The other thing that struck me is how hard he worked. Like he would say "Hold on a second!" and you could hear him practicing the first line into the song and he would be changing his vowel sounds and practicing a couple different approaches, and he’d pick a direction and say, “Alright, let’s go for it.” But he worked really hard and that was impressive to see.

For a guy at his age, really he doesn’t have to do anything, he could just sing Dream On the rest of his life and make more money than most of us could ever dream of seeing, but he works really hard. The second thing that really blew my mind is the first day he was here, his assistant was going, “Hey Steven we gotta go, come on we’re going to be late!” and Steven grabbed that guitar right there and said, “Check this out!” And he starts playing all these new songs he’s writing.

To see this guy so excited about creating music at 60+ years old, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, to see him so excited about making music still was inspiring. He knows exactly what’s going on, he knows exactly how to do it, and he made everyone feel incredibly comfortable and it was really one of the funnest couple of days ever. I was blown away at how amazing it was! 

Secret For Great Vocal Sounds

Secret I got from background singer Perry Coleman. You don’t dare give this guy any instruction because he knows what to do. He’s sung with so many number ones. There’s two things that he does that are really stunning. His phrasing is immaculate. I mean he’ll listen to the lead part and he will match the phrasing to a tee. And then when he sings he does this thing where he self-compresses.

The way he sings a phrase he’ll roll the s’s off, he does all this kind of stuff. If you solo his vocal part it might sound funny, but put it with the lead and it’s brilliant. I’ve never had to tune one vocal that he has sung here. Ever. If he’s singing to a lead vocal part, I’ll tune the lead vocal first so he’s singing to a tuned vocal so I never have to touch him. The really interesting thing that he does is if there’s a lot of S’s or P’s, he’ll sing through his fingers. What that does is it splits the wind and reduces the impact of the diaphragm of the mic and it also reduces the energy that the mic is receiving. It’s brilliant.

Secrets For Great Guitar Sounds

There’s a couple things you can do. Obviously you have to have well intonated instruments. I think that's the most important thing. You don’t necessarily have to have heavy gauge strings, but I’ve found that heavier gauged strings allow you to dig in a little more and keep the intonation in line. It also pulls heavier tones out, sounds like they have more weight to them. All my guitars are at least 11’s.

Again it goes back to your ability to pull the tone out of the instrument with your hands. It’s how to attack the string and how you hold the pick, and how you pull the tone out of the instrument. The biggest misstep with a lot of guitar players is they use too much saturation and they feel like that’s going to give them a bigger, nastier sound. Depending on the part in the song it might work, but if you’re planning on stacking guitar parts, you can bigger sound if you air on the more cleaner sound and stack those parts.

Mixing Tricks For Acoustic Guitars

I always parallel compress my acoustic instruments. I blend it in where the compressed signal sits right in the center and the uncompressed signal moves to the peaks and the valleys. You get the articulation and dynamic sensibility of the acoustic instrument. For acoustic instruments there’s a chain I always use and it always sounds amazing. I use a Neumann Gefell 5802 which is a small diaphragm tube microphone, and I use a Telefunken V72 and I use a little bit of the LA2A just to kiss it a little bit. If I’m cutting the acoustic guitar part I use a really light pick and play lightly, what happens is the guitar sounds huge.

Mixing Tricks for Heavy Guitars

I use a lot of filtering, so if we’ve got an intro, verse, chorus, I’ll automate a filter to come in during the verse so that the filter reduces the size of the guitar in the verse then when it hits the chorus the filter kicks off and the guitar sounds huge. I want to make sure that the grind and attitude of the instrument doesn’t change. I love really heavy guitars. I love cutting them so that the downbeat and the step-off notes are tight.

Jam Session