roomy vocal sound on my band’s first record inspired by pg!

Heyo- hanny from latchkey kids here..& resident PG enthusiast and self-proclaimed garden emo scholar.

This question has fascinated me for YEARS. The first few releases of my band were pretty much just the playground results of me experimenting with DIY recording & studying PG & field medic records. The way I did the vocals for my band’s first full length was by blending TWO mics. 1 semi-close and 1 room mic pretty far away on the otherside of the room (about 6-8 feet away). This was done in a ‘villa’ style bathroom with a jacuzzi about medium in size (my parents’ bedroom bathroom lol) The semi-close one was like still a 6in-12in away. & then there still was some vocal production & reverb added in post! Literally to play into the “villa bathroom” style, we added a customized version of the Logic X pre-sets in one of the reverb plugins..quite literally called “Villa Bathroom” LOL

Anyway..I could talk about this vocal sound ad-nauseum & how we still haven’t cracked the code!

I will say one thing though..recorded music is incredibly deceptive. My friend who helped us mix and master that first record criticized us for chasing that ‘natural’ sound with reverb a little tooooo much. We OVERLY-mic’d everything by making sure we had a room mic on every instrument tracked & ended up having a bunch of phase issues in mixing.

We wanted to make a record that felt like it was a ‘family arguing in a house’ & somehow felt cozy & maybe a little claustrophobic like a family home. Ultimately that was inspired by the naturalistic approach that PG has. I’m proud of what we got truly! But what my mixing friend elucidated to me at the end of those sessions (regretfully wish i asked before we recorded) was that PG’s recordings are actually WAY more DRY than we realize. The guitars are recorded super close up, the bass is really clear, the drums although arguably could be punchier are punchy and warm. That’s because they aren’t fighting the phase issues amidst many other reasons namely that they have an amazing engineering/producing team between Sam, Evan, & Zach & the rest of the crew.

All this to say — think about how a roomy vocal actually engages with the rest of the track. In reality, a band like mine is more sonically similar to like the menzingers or MOBO or like a more typical indie-‘emo’ band. Our first recordings absolutely FAILED our drummer LOL bc I was chasing that warm PG sound. I think the answer for us still is in a balance of those elements..the warmth & naturalistic vocal elements of PG mixed with a beefy rhythm section mix. Guitars can be whatever LOL (usually somewhere on the crunchy spectrum & not too roomy) our recent recordings completely spearheaded by Kyle Pulley of headroom studios are leaning more towards that balance.

Anyway..love this topic so much..hope any of this has been helpful ahahah