You may remember that we said in the previous blog, that many of the pre-production vocal recordings had such a good quality, that they could be used as the final vocal recordings, right?
Okay, that was before the “perfection virus” 😆 fully hit the production team. While listening through the pre-production vocal tracks of all 12 songs, the team (including our lyricist Tim) detected some little problems and sloppy work here and there. For example, there were some passages where the vocal melodies were not precisely phrased or sung as intended in the original composition, or sometimes the expression of the vocals could have been done with a little more feel and emotion, especially for ballads on the album.
So we decided to throw some of the existing vocal tracks over board and try to redo them even better as previously, given the fact that after 3 weeks of singing, Ronny’s voice developed more quality and tone, which is usually the case for singers, when their voice is challenged on a daily basis.
Currently we have 5 songs were the vocals are fully finished, and 7 songs were the vocals are finished but some imperfections need to be fixed, or some additions, like harmony voices need to be added or fixed. This will take us approximately another 5 days before we can declare the vocals to be finished.
One thing we can conclude already: This album includes some of the most sophisticated vocal arrangements, which were ever done for a Twins album. For the song ‘Johnny, can you hear me’ (and others as well) we have produced many polyphonic harmony vocal tracks, in a style we had never tried before and which resulted in a surprisingly dense sounding ‘vocal carpet’.
By the way: On this album you will not hear any female voices or choirs. This time all voices and choirs were done by Ronny, even the higher ones. Why? Because we think that female vocals tend to make a song much softer and more pleasing, which is something we had not intended for this album, which was planned to have a “darker” and “more serious” style and tone. But don’t worry, it will still be a Twins-style album, but with a little more mature and thoughtful approach 😉