CAPTAIN CONTAGIOUS
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
COACH STORCH
Storch may wrangle beats and bass to his will, but when it comes to vocals, he's more diplomatic. “Sometimes, when [vocalists are] in it, it's hard to see it, so when they have an outside person coaching them through it, it helps them realize what they gotta do,” he says. “And then, slowly but surely, these rappers or singers get used to that way of thinking, and then you don't have to say anything.”
Before vocalists get to that point, though, Storch steps lightly. “You don't want anybody to think that you're trying to tell them how to do what they do,” he says. “You have to almost let people think of things themselves and just take them there to the point where they'll realize it and then figure it out. There are definitely walls that people put up around them and a lot of egos and personalities, and you have to cater to that and keep a love vibe in the room.”
Once Storch gets the vocals down, he can make further decisions about what space is left tonewise. “Some people have a sort of magic tone,” Wayne says. “Their chest-cavity tone is very compliant with electronics. And Scott will take advantage of that; he'll put heavier drums in, louder snares, brighter cymbals, because the quality of the vocal can withstand that much more quality of the music.”
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Together with Storch, Wayne has a recipe for the perfect vocal sound. But as clean and clear as it sounds, it's based on a lot of different things. Wayne prefers small, dead vocal booths — somewhere between 8-by-8 and 10-by-10 feet — but not so small that the lowest frequency in a vocalist's voice can't reproduce. The magic combination of outboard gear is a pricey Sony C800G mic (retailing for $8,500) through an Avalon Vt-737sp preamp and an Apogee AD-8000 converter into Pro Tools. “The Avalon's impedance matches incredibly with the Sony,” Wayne says. “The output of the Sony and Avalon are like twin brothers. So what comes out of Sony hits the Avalon, and I'm guaranteed not to lose any quality of the Sony.”
But the setup requires maintenance. One day, Wayne — who has an electrical engineering degree — discovered that his prized Sony C800G mic suddenly sounded horrible. After a long conversation with a tech-support guy at Sony, he learned that the mic tube only lasts 225 hours. And the Avalon Vt-737sp tube doesn't last much longer. So now he changes the Sony tube after every artist he works with and changes the Avalon tube every couple of artists. “A tube is like a light bulb,” he says. “The more you turn it on and off, the faster it's gonna blow.”
Wayne uses only one knob (on the preamp section) of the Avalon, saving EQ and compression for the monitoring side. “If you're fixing something, you can fix it before the EQ,” Wayne says. “When I walk into a studio and see 100 million red lights lit up, I know it's like, ‘Here we are set in stone’ or, ‘Here we are, someone fighting bad tubes.’”
BEAUTIFUL NEUTRALITY
“I learned a long time ago that audio is like looking through a window when it comes to recording vocals,” Wayne says. “You want to be able to see the person. Every time you add something, you're adding another window, and some of those windows are darker than others.” So while the windows are clear on the outboard side, Wayne uses an effects package — about nine plug-ins — on the monitoring side to create what he calls a “neutral setting.” An LA-2A, 4-band EQ, de-esser, TC|Chorus, WaveLab reverb, Echo Farm and Digidesign Long Delay are some of the options, sometimes with multiple copies and signal routings. But he doesn't like anything obvious, such as a wash of reverb. “All that does is muddy up the record and get in the way of the frequencies.
“In the real world,” Wayne continues, “there are millions of vibrations, outside noise rumble, flanging, phasing, chorusing, all these different things to come up with what's known as a neutral setting,” he says. “If you treated your equipment like an eardrum, everyone is going to sound like who they're supposed to sound like. So when I set up all my equipment, I set it up just like I hear things. And everyone goes crazy when they hear their vocals.”
Once the vocals are down, Wayne eliminates artifacts and rolls off frequencies that cause any rumbling or echo. One big issue is headphone bleed. “Headphone bleed needs to be eliminated because it makes frequencies bug out when you put it back with the multitrack,” he says. He prefers Sony MDR-V700DJ headphones because the cushion's good enough to eliminate a lot of bleeding. And if they're well taken care of, he won't have to turn up the volume louder than expected to compensate for worn-out, abused headphones. He also brings his own Samsung headphone amp that matches the impedance of the headphones (600 ohms), so the headphones won't blow out.
SOUNDS OF THE PIANO MAN
Although Storch mainly plays keyboards, he's versatile with sounds. Case in point is the wah-wah guitar of Beyoncé's “Me, Myself and I,” which he emulated on a keyboard. “Sometimes I use a real wah-wah pedal and run it through a guitar patch,” Storch says. “You gotta get to the heart of what register certain presets are set up for in certain octaves, what sounds believable within that artificial instrument.”
He does the same thing with string sounds, using a good orchestra set for synthetic strings when necessary. “Live strings, there's no limit to what you can do, and there's no keyboard sound or anything that could ever compete with that,” Storch says. “If the center of the song is strings, then you gotta take the plunge and put together a string section, which is obviously not a cheap thing to do. But with certain situations it doesn't make sense, and I just try to make the most of it.”
However, sounds that aren't the center of attention are still important, such as the surprise cameos of bell-like synths during Lil' Kim's verse on Christina Aguilera's “Can't Hold Us Down.” “You gotta keep people's attention,” Storch insists. “So sometimes I'll save an element for two minutes into the song, something refreshing and new to get into halfway into the record. There are a couple of cats out here that make more than an 8-bar loop, that take the time for the song to count for all four minutes.”
Although Storch likes the finer things in life, his hardware synth collection is surprisingly small. “I used to work with Mario Winans, and he would have me set up 45 different instruments and go really crazy,” Wayne says. “I started working with Scott, and he would set up five things, and bang! The lack of so many toys to play with definitely helps in being creative.” On the other hand, Storch is expanding on his software synth collection. “When you get a new bunch of sounds added to the computer, it inspires a whole bunch of new songs, and it gives you a little creative turbocharge,” Storch says.
Creative energy is something Storch has in spades, and with his engineering team, he's a force to be reckoned with. But from being a guy who was once behind on his rent to a superproducer with an endless cash flow, Storch is a good example of someone who balances creativity with business savvy. “You can't rush into the first deal that somebody offers you,” he says. “As much as you feel like you need to or whatever emergency it is financially, you can't compromise. It might work for you at the time, but you might regret it later. People have a hard time thinking of themselves as successful and [end up] limiting what their future can do if they sign to somebody exclusively or make the wrong decisions in a contract. My advice is, look before you leap.”
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