One of the best kept Mutt secrets....Try this and you will be absolutely amazed!!!!! Doc The Doctors lounge Sign Up Link flatfiv.co/drs... Dr. Bob Store Link flatfiv.co/col...
additional tip, I try to avoid articulating hard consonants in my whisper tracks, like K's, T's, P's. I just focus mostly on the vowel sounds, and I find that it makes it cleaner, and prevents mouthy saliva clicks from creeping in.
I normally use Spiff to take care of harsh consonants and mouth clicks when I mix whisper tracks. But yes, if the vocalist can perform them cleanly for me, that's great.
Mutt Lange had Phil Collen play single notes in a chord and layered them together instead of single chords in some sections. The clarity of the chord is insane.
I've done quite a few things with whispering, including taking the pitch down an octave, and/or overdubbing several tracks of it, etc. Adding effects to whispering is when it really gets fun. You can hear it on Riders on the Storm by The Doors.
U Da Man Bobby! What a great tip. I've been a big Mutt fan for decades and you know how to explain all his magical tricks. Keep 'em coming! Thanks a bunch!
I've always thought that Def Leppard sounded far too over-produced after Pyromania. This video really explains how it was done. Not saying it isn't effective. Obviously it worked. But, the layers and layers plus tons of compression make the final product sound far too artificial to my ears. JMO.
I agree completely, and I would include Pyromania. They produced some very catchy songs but I always thought their sound was way too polished and sterile. I love the loyalty that they showed to Rick Allen but, call me a prick, I couldn't stand the one arm drummer bit. His electronic, trigger and sample based kit just added to the soul-less slickness to their music.
Agreed. For me Pyromania was the perfect balance between "organic" and well produced, but what came after was just too much to handle. Hysteria to me Is kinda annoying sometimes, like really fucking annoying.
Mutt Lange had the killer sounds going thanks for exposing/explaining how these were achieved! How much does this differ for the AC/DC work would you mind covering that in future videos?
Very creative and clever Bobby. The Dr. Theme and ending are very well thought out ideas. I enjoyed the video and you really sound like Joe Elliott on those tracks. Keep up the good work and best wishes to you in your RU-vid journey!
I've done this for years when laying down ideas late at night, and never got rid of them because they fit so well in the mix...glad to eventually see that this is legit 😝
This is something I’ve used more with screaming vocalists than melodic vocalists. If the person just can’t really produce a scream that is pleasant (oxymoron much?) and huge and monstrous, a whisper vocal mixed in helps a ton.
@@ardiris2715 very much so. I’ve actually worked with Halford in the studio, but I generally am known for working with more “extreme” metal bands. The Cookie Monster vocal guys. There’s undeniably an art to what they’re doing whether you enjoy it or not and a lot of them require a lot of studio magic to make them sound like Satan giving birth to a porcupine backwards. Others I throw up a mic and that unholy sound bellows out of them as if they were born to summon it from Dante’s 7th circle of hell.
@@michaelkeene5950 Similarly on guitar, Paul Simon (may have?) recorded the strings of an unplugged electric guitar. I use that a lot to punch up my 12-string home recordings in a way that sounds similar to the vocal trick.
Liking these vids Bobby, but riddle me this Doctor Robert...who do you reckon came up with the idea for the ethereal, spooky, highly reverbed whisper track on "Riders On The Storm"?
TBH Mike Shipley (engineer) had just as much to do with the 'Mutt Lange' sound as Mutt did. When it came to working with tape and everything analog, Mike was a magician.
This may not work on a Joni Mitchell song, but I' know I'll find a place to use it! Thanks Dr. Bob. (In music school we called our director Dr. Bob, but only `cause he hated it. He was ROB.)
The accusation has always been that Mutt Lang over-engineered Def Leppard and I tend to agree. But the band has always been able to recreate the sound live on stage.
He did great on High and Dry (more raw AC/DC clone sound) and Pyromania (a lot of tech and tricks but still has some hard rock and balls to the sound.)
Excellent! I've already been doing stereo whispers on some tracks, but with a soft delivery. The crowd style angst delivery is genius! Hysteria was such a production masterpiece for its time. The documentary about it is inspiring.
So did the band actually sing every song with multiple ‘takes’ including singing the songs in whisper? Or did they just sing it once and used black magic foolery?
AT 2:34 Singing loud while trying to be quiet or being quiet while trying to sing loud... repeating to someone what you overheard when you seen 2 people screaming at each other... Lol.. I thought walk this way is an Aerosmith song... ;- ) I'm just kidding... Step inside walk this way you & me babe hey hey
That's awesome. I've heard that in so many of Def Leppard's tracks and never knew how they were getting that effect. Makes perfect sense now. It blends so well. It truly sounds like a crowd singing along with the chorus. Who knew? Thank you!
Actually it's the whitenoize effect and you do not need to whisper into new channels.. what u already have is enough.. mix down every 8 track with the same voicing into 2 tracks and use a vocoder which can turn your vocal signal into whitenoize (it sounds exactly like a whisper) back in the day I was using an old plugin for this OpCode Fusion VOCODE.. now Izotope vocal synth does the job.. after that use a slight panner too.. panman soundtoys is good for that..
That’s a great technic. I feel like the whispers were mixed a little too hot in this example. Also back off the mic more when recording them to give it some natural space.idk about using reverse verb on the whispers. Those might sound better not swishing around. Whatever, I appreciate your studies of the awesome Mutt approaches. ✌🏼
In my experience If I want to have the whisper tracks that high I have to heavily EQ them so that the normal vocals mask them. Normally that means removing a lot of low end and midrange up to about 3/4kHz with broad bells and low shelves, and boosting the top end without bringing up a creepy harsh tone. In Bobby's defence, the only instruments apart from the vocals were drums so it was going to be very hard to use the whispers to add something to the sound while being "invisible".
Great video. If you've never seen the scene in the movie "Hysteria - The Def Leppard Story" where Mutt (played spectacularly by Anthony Michael Hall) is riding Joe Elliot to stack vocals on "Bringin' on the Heartbreak" you really need to - it'll blow your mind! Pure cinematic platinum! It's around 26 minutes in. \m/
Here we are 36 years later still dissecting Hysteria, still asking questions about the production, still wondering how they got certain sounds and how they accomplished certain techniques, still discovering buried secrets. Keep in mind computers were in their infancy at the time, with Mutt and band literally having to invent the necessary technology and gear to get the sounds they heard in their heads. Hysteria has to be the greatest mainstream record ever made. Anyone less than Mutt driving the band to get the most out of them, and this would not have worked.
Mutt Lange is one of the music industry celebs I admire most. It's not just his simply crazy discography list but also his lifestyle, diligence and wisdom. And, of course, the fact that he was married to Shania Twain.
@@WearyWatcher way to take all of his accomplishments and immolate them by mentioning a mistake he made. I hope you don't have anything you've done wrong. Wouldn't want you to become invalidated.
I've noticed in addition to me it sounds like the low octave vocal was tracked with the tape running at slightly higher speed. The impacting result comes when the tape is played back at normal speed the low harmony has slower slurred(for lack of a better term) harmonic effect. Cool video
It would have been nice to hear all the vox together without the eq and effects also . That being said , I like to “ back off “ of the mic a little to reduce the proximity effect on the whispers and then add a little phase or flanger to them . Then I squash them a bit more with compression and sometimes add a whisper panned dead center at a lower volume, depending. Nice video thank you 🙏
Wow. Mutt Lang is a Genius. You did a terrific job on this demo too. The whisper vocals give it that extra large crowd join sound, or how ever you want to call it. Awesome. Thanks for this revealing info. "Hey guys, I'm gonna get rich from RU-vid." Said no one ever. Oh, wait, Didn't Bobby Huff say that? I think he did. LOL
I think they use this in TV commercials the female voice over always sounds like shes talking and whispering at the same time. trying to seduce us . its annoying af
That's amazing. Thank you! A friend told me to record whispers on top of the vox "like Prince used to do". Following that "sound" advice (pun intended) we recorded literal tiny teeny whispers and it sounded like poo together! But that's more like it! Sure enough, Trent Reznor has used that same trick too!
Try putting the whisper vocal through a highpass filter to cut some of the lows out of it. You can use the filter to tune it a bit to better suit the tonality of your mix.
The biggest trick to background vocals in Mutts production was Mutt singing. He would also do a trick where they would not decode some of the tracks which were recorded with Dolby. The unencoded Dolby tracks sound very bright and whispery.
I too have used this technique on vocals and this is just semantics really, but what I am looking to achieve and what I hear in the original Def Leppard vocals and in your vocal performance is what I call the arena rock effect. It makes it sound like it’s 1985 and you’re listening to a Live at Buddakan (or more appropriately an English speaking country) and the crowd is singing along, but there’s so many of them that their voices are a haze of white-pinkish noise added to the vocals.
The first "whisper vocal" I can remember hearing was "Riders on The Storm" by The Doors. It was quite mesmerizing to hear it in such an epic track. Thanks for the great video, I appreciate how you broke down how to create this effect!😀
I came across this technique in the most unlikely place: Billy Ocean’s When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going. It’s near the end during the call and answer section near the end of the song. For a second I thought I spotted Joe Elliot’s voice, but I’m guessing it’s actually Mutt Lange. He’s credited as one of the composers of the song.
I was ten years old when I bought Hysteria. It was not just my first Def Leppard album, it was the first album I ever got. I was amazed at the sound of the backing vocals, and I really did just think that the guys backing the lead singer just sounded like this when harmonising, I had no other explanation. I guess I was only ten and knew nothing of effects and such. It was years later before I heard 'Thought I'd Died and Gone To Heaven' by Bryan Adams and I immediately thought how cool it was that members of Def Leppard had done backing vocals for Brian! :) I found that this wasn't the case many years later again (birth of the internet actually made such research a possibility) but I could never ever find out why these vocals sounded so alike and what trickery was at work. So imagine the satisfaction here in me tonight, some 35 years after first hearing Hysteria, at finally learning the secret to those amazing vocals thanks to a random RU-vid recommendation finally coming my way and ending the mystery. Thank you so much for this video!
Grew up on Hysteria too and I had similar realizations listening to Shania Twain later in life. "Wow, why does this sound like Def Leppard??" Then I learned about Mutt Lange later. Probably the only producer I can identify instantly if I hear one of his tracks. "hmmm, I bet this was produced by Mutt Lange..." sure enough, usually correct.
Was my first album too! I was 13. I couldnt believe how good the guitar sounded. I thought the vocals were just how queen does it. Part of the reason i started playing guitar. Still learning god knows how many years later!
@@johnhutchison9782 Never recovered? Really???? That's why they were selling millions of albums after Willis left and had countless hits when they hired Mutt Lange to produce 4 of their albums. Lange is the one who largely gave the band their signature sound. Willis was a drunk who was fired for being drunk far too many times and been warned repeatedly over a two year period. Phil Collen took over in place of Willis and the band has been a success and still recording in the studio and touring pretty much ever since. Tell me again how they never recovered. Lol
@@IRIDEHARLEYS - it means DL never were the same creatively. Willis wrote and played on a lot of their last really good album Pyromania. He together with the others brought a vibe and magic to the band quite irrespective of his drinking. That vibe and magic was absent after. And an autotuned duck can sell albums, so I really don’t care how big Hysteria or later albums were. I respect the later work fine as an engineer but don’t listen to it as a music fan.
It took me a while to actually figure out where Mutt was using this trick in the DL catalogue, but the answer was right in front of me the entire time. The most widespread use of the whisper vocal is on Love and Affection from the Hysteria album. It even sounds like he’s using a low-note whisper too.
Glad you are bringing this back. I was doing this on my tascam in the 80s. Didn't know it was a secret. Next thing, you will be slowing down the recording to half speed and recording vocals....
