Today I started my research on Frank Ocean’s recording/mix engineer Jeff Ellis. Jeff worked extensively on Frank Ocean’s Grammy winning album Channel Orange and today I watched an interview with him and Sound On Sound Magazine, where he detailed many aspects of his production techniques. In this blog post I will be focusing on his vocal tracking techniques.

Throughout the course of this interview Jeff was very vocal on the importance of working with good artists, at 6 minutes he said “don’t let the engineering get in the way of the art” this was followed by him saying  “to make great art, you need to work with great artists” at 9 minutes and 58 seconds. Jeff detailed that whilst working with Frank Ocean they would have a lot of free form sessions where they would have no real direction, but would sit down and develop ideas together he would often have multiple instruments set up and have an SM58 inside the control room so any ideas could be recorded quickly.

When it came to the actual vocal tracking of Frank Ocean at 6 minutes and 40 seconds Jeff explained how he used a Neuman u47 microphone, he described the microphone as “not very bright” which he explained was a useful thing to have because when the mixing phase begins the vocals will undergo multiple layers of compression and by the time all this compression has happened the vocals will have naturally became brighter. He also talked about how he doesn’t cut off a lot of low end from a vocal recording because he loves the chest voice and describes it as emotional.

From carrying out this piece of research I can apply this vocal tracking workflow of Jeff Ellis by trying to make sure I work with talented artists to produce good music, I can also  use a Neuman u47 in some of my vocal tracking session and leave in the low end of any male vocalists I work with to try and bring emotion into these tracks I am mixing.

This post relates to learning outcome 4

Full interview is available at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izZMM5eHCtQ&t=442s