Marvin Gaye's isolated vocals from Heard It Through The Grapevine.



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11/21 '19 5 Comments
Flawless. Flawless. Without flaw.
Thank you for this.
This gives me chills. Actual chills. Sigh.
I too love this. In fact, I love it so much I wish there was a version sans the reverb.
Now see, I LOVE the fact that you can so clearly hear that magnificent EMT 140 Plate doing its plate thing here. In the full mix it disappears almost completely, there is almost always a horn stab or backing vocal that runs over the decay. Here you can hear the whole tail, and that shows what it's actually adding to the body of the vocal, at least to my ears. A little emphasis on the high end, some spatial depth obviously, a thickness to the falsetto parts...and yeah, a slight metallic sheen, but come on. That's how the song has always sounded. If you love this vocal performance, part of what your ears latched on to was the EMT 140, it's inseparable.

Plate reverb drives me crazy. I can't dial it in on instruments for shit (plus/or digital algorithms are shit for replicating a giant sheet of metal). It's useless to audition a single sound on a plate algo because the whole point is how it affects where things sit in the mix. Which is what makes it so great for vocals. Which I never record. So.

Anyway this way awesome, thanks Ray.