1950's/early 60's Girl Group Style Recordings

[fleaguit]

Hey guys,

I've been lurking here on this forum for a few months now, and I first want to say thanks to everyone for the awesome advice I constantly see posted here. This is a great community, and it's definetely helped answer alot of questions I've had, and has helped me a bit on my current project.

Right now, I'm mixing some songs for the soundtrack to a film I'm working on. The movie is a Sci-Fi Horror Musical, set in the 1950's. The songs were tracked last summer (just drums,bass, vocals, and a scratch piano track) I wasn't really involved in the recording process, but the studio that did the original tracking closed down. I'm working on doing the overdubs for this project, as well as all the mixing.

I have a song that I'm working on now from the film, that the director is looking for the sort of classic "Girl Group" sound from the late 50's / Early 60's. Some of the samples he gave me to go by were the Shirelles "One Fine Day" and some of the early Phil Spector stuff, such as his recordings with The Ronnettes.

The tracks I have now were all recorded flat, so does anyone have any suggestions how to move them closer to the sound I'm looking for? You can hear a sample of the song in the trailer for the film at:

www.farheight.com

The song is the last one in the trailer, that ends with the words "Saturday Night"

If anyone has any suggestions, or ideas for me even where to start while doing this, I'd appreciate it, thanks.

BTW, I'm using Logic Express 7.

[guitar junkie]

the more mono the better... what I heard sounds a little thin, not enough grit to it.... the girls are not really singing with that vintage sound really, It will be hard to pull a true vintage sound off without that.

[brandondrury]

Well, the trailer is in Quicktime. That rules me out. I'd rather drink AIDs blood than install Quicktime on my system.

The old sound is not exactly easy to get these days. There is a lot more going on in the midrange on those old recordings and a lot less in the high end.

If it was me, I'd start by duplicating the track (and hoping there are no phase issues). I'd take Copy #1 and distort it pretty good with something like Anteras Tube. I wouldn't go too overboard, but I'd try to get some umph in there. After the distortion, I'd roll off the high end. It's hard to say what would be best here. But I'm guessing everything over 2Khz needs to go. It may be 1K or it may be 4K.

Basically, you are looking for the telephone sound, but with more low end. You may need to roll off the low end as well, but that depends on your tracks.

Then I would start blending the two tracks and see where you end up.

Also, I would not be shy about compressing the living hell out of the vocal either.

Brandon

[guitar junkie]

I would be willing to do a 50s mix.....

Most of my stuff has a vintage vibe to it, I can provide some samples....

[tonewheels]

I think Brandon is on the right track with the distortion and compression. As it sounds now it reminds me of "Grease" or " Little Shop of Horrors", a litte to clean.
As guitar Junkie said, more mono, keep the stereo imaging sparse.
The Phil Spector "wall of sound" is very dense, lots of midrange in the instrumentation, with lots of highs and high mids in the vocals to let them cut through.
I have noticed on top of the "dense" mix, Phil liked to add very bright sounding tambourine or glockenspiel to add a little flavour.
Another Spector trait is reverb, reverb and reverb, but don't just add a ton of reverb and expect a "wall of sound", the sound of his recordings are so crammed with instruments the tails of the reveb are not as noticable as they should be.

It seems to me that the reverb and tambourine/glockenspiel added an efect that makes mono almost as "exiting" sounding as stereo.

Cheers,
Ronnie B.

[guitar junkie]

spring or plate reverb too.... nothing real natural sounding...

I grew up listening to 40s and 50s music as a little kid, still listen to it a lot even now.... Any way I have to go out on tour and the end of the week so my time in studio going to down to zero.

[brandondrury]

Keep the early reflections in the vocal reverb. I very seldom leave early reflections in the vocal reverb for modern music, for the old stuff, it's definitely in there.

Brandon

[fleaguit]

Hey guys,

I've been working t he past few days and haven't had the chance to check this thread. THanks so much for all the suggestions. I'm going to start playing around with the mix this weekend and I'll post a sample mix early next week.

Thanks again.

-Steve

[brandondrury]

We look forward to it, Steve.

One other thing. Maybe sit down and actually listen to some of the music you intend to emulate on your studio monitors. 100% cloning of the sound won't be possible, but you should capture the vibe / spirit of the 50s recordings.

Brandon

[fleaguit]

Yeah, that's what I've been doing. We just moved to a new space and I finally have my monitors set up in the right spot, so I've been listening to alot of that stuff. I don't want a direct emulation, I want the recordings to sound crisp and clean, but with a lot of the vibe and mix of those recordings.