Hello,
I posted the following article a way back about James Porte being a vocal engineer (the dude knows how to work in the studio) read the article below:
Boyz II Men's Full Circle
Engineer: James Porte
James Porte is young enough that he idolized Boyz II Men years before he had a chance to work with them. “I loved that first album [
Cooleyhighharmony],” he says. “I remember driving around in my Isuzu Impulse playing the Boyz II Men cassette really loud when I was in high school. So it was cool to get to work with them now — knowing their legend — and getting to hear what they can do in the studio.”
Born in Liberia but raised mostly in Tennessee (where he attended Middle Tennessee State's excellent recording program), Porte moved to New York City a few years ago and landed a job as a manager at the Hit Factory and picked up some engineering work along the way. He's done remix work with The Trackmasters and worked with a number of artists on his own, but the eight tracks (out of 14) he engineered on Boyz II Men's latest,
Full Circle, are probably his best and highest-profile work to date. When we spoke, he had just begun work in Miami with Lauryn Hill.
The first surprise about Boyz II Men, who are certainly in the pantheon of great vocal ensembles, is that they record individually rather than as a group. “They never sang together,” says Porte, who tracked their vocals in two different rooms at the Hit Factory: studios 1 and 4, each of which is equipped with SSL 9000 J consoles. “We did everything separately. They start off with one guy going in and singing the melody. The next guy will come in — it's almost like it's tag team — and do the harmony or another part. Or somebody may do two parts when they're in there. But it's usually not something they've rehearsed. They know their voices, and they know exactly what to do. It was very relaxed. They wouldn't even be sitting in the studio waiting and listening to what the other person was doing. They'd be recording in another room or just waiting for their turn. ‘Okay, let me hear what he just did. Cool. Let's go!’ And they'd go in and be on it right away. It was amazing.”
Porte says that all four of the Boyz — Wanya Morris, Nathan Morris, Shawn Stockman and Michael McCary — are “very open-minded, and they're into the latest technology, as well as the old-school technology. They were totally into trying different microphones. If it was a more aggressive song, they wanted to use an edgier microphone. If it was a pretty ballad, they wanted to use something that had some smoothness to it.
“What we did was try to find a mic that covered the dynamic range and frequency response of pretty much everyone,” Porte continues, “and what we found worked really for us was the Neumann M149 because it covered the bass range and Shawn on the pretty top-end harmony. It's a really warm mic; it adds a nice body to the voice. Plus, it has enough air on the top end that it's a cool sound. We also used a vintage C-12, which has a lot of top end but not as bright as the [Sony] C880G, which we also tried out. That was actually used on the Babyface song [“The Color of Love”], because it works well on that more pop style because it's very open and transparent. But it wasn't as good for the edgier stuff we were doing. The C-12 was used mostly on the more laid-back or lush songs.”
Porte tracked the Boyz to a 48-channel Pro Tools setup, “and I had it hooked up to an Aardvark Aardsync to try to enhance the clocking of the whole system. Whenever possible, we tried to use the Apogee AD8000 converters. The two preamps we used the most were the Avalon M2 dual-channel and a Martech. The Martech is great for anything — clean and transparent, but also with some warmth.”
The rich, creamy stacks of background vocals proved to be the most challenging element of the project for Porte. On several songs, there are four tracks of each backing vocal part, and one — “I'll Show You” — has six tracks of each harmony. “We did six parts, six stacks, and the harmonies are so intricate on that song it almost sounds like a Take 6 record,” Porte says. “The vocal producer on that one, J. Moss, was a real stickler; we did that song for three days. But it's got 24 tracks of backgrounds and then leads on top of that — probably 36 tracks of vocals. It was grueling.
“But the thing with them is that they blend so well with each other, it doesn't sound like that many tracks. Sometimes it sounds like one person, it's so thick and so tight. At the same time, they make everything they do their own. If Shawn sings something, he makes it Shawn. If Nate sings something, he makes it Nate, and so on.”
Because he was not going to be mixing the project, Porte didn't have to think too much about effects on the vocals, but he did have his hand in a couple of interesting sonic touches. He reveals that on “Roll Wit Me,” the robotic voice was achieved using the Pro Tools AutoTune function: “Then, when it came time to mix, they used the AutoTune mixed with another effect to be a little less clichéd and to create something a little different, because that whole AutoTune sound is getting a little played out.” And the telephone vocal sound on “I'm Okay, You're Okay” came from a Q10 plug-in. “The Q10 is a little dark, so you have to brighten it up a little bit,” Porte says. “As with anything, you have to tweak until you get the best sound for that song.”
http://mixonline.com/recording/applications/audio_recording_vocals/