Alexa Terry: [00:00:00] This week, we are joined from across the pond by vocalist and singing teacher, Gareth Henderson. Gareth has been a friend of BAST for many years, and as well as opening a studio with multiple teaching rooms, a recording studio, rehearsal rooms, dance studios, and a cafe, he taught music tech in a college before uprooting his life and work to Australia. 

 We're very happy to have you here, Gareth, on the Singing Teachers Talk podcast, talking to us about sound engineering and sound production, which I must admit, I don't have any knowledge on. So I'm going to come away from this with a lot in my pocket. So thank you in advance. 

Gareth Henderson: No, my pleasure. 

Alexa Terry: What are we referring to when we talk about sound engineering specifically?  

Gareth Henderson: To be fair, it's, it's a simple answer. It's a painfully simple answer because sound engineering is exactly what it sounds like. You are taking sound and crafting it in some way, just as you would if you were doing electrical engineering or structural engineering, you're just taking the sound and making [00:01:00] it either different or better. So, that's it really.  

Alexa Terry: You're in a really good setting for this because you've got all your bits and pieces in the background. So what sort of equipment is quite typical for a sound engineer? 

Gareth Henderson: So I was thinking about this because obviously you can imagine it can be spectacularly diverse, but the thing that we should probably consider is that a sound engineer is going to need to get sound into the equipment they're going to use. So we can probably guess most of the time that's microphones. 

So that's critical. , if it was guitars, pianos, there are boxes that we can use that we can plug things into to get the sound from the outside world into a sound system, they're called DI boxes. It's going to go into something to blend those sounds together, so that would be a mixing desk. And most mixing desks, whether they are physical and real, which are the kind that we're used to seeing in all these videos of the Beatles and stuff. 

But a lot of mixing desks these days are just computer interfaces where really what's happening inside is computer but we're still looking at [00:02:00] mixing and then there are tools to sort of shape that sound to make it either more boomy, less boomy, more bright, less bright, louder, quieter sounding like they're in a big room all that kind of nonsense. And then the back end of that it has to come out somewhere so speakers and that description is probably reasonably, because I was vague, it's probably reasonably true of both live sound and studio sound..  

Alexa Terry: You use the term mix there, and that's quite a divisive term when we talk about singing technique. 

Gareth Henderson: It really is kind of silly. We can, we can divide ourselves up over the words we use to describe things, but hey, that, that's not just true in singing tuition, but I do know what you mean, yes. 

Alexa Terry: Is it the same sort of thing in sound engineering? Is it divisive there or does it have quite a definitive meaning? 

Gareth Henderson: It's such a general meaning that it's not in the least bit divisive. I mean, mixing audio is a bit like mixing food, you take a bunch of ingredients, you get them together in a way that people think is [00:03:00] balanced. People's thoughts on what is balanced is as varied in sound as it is food. 

You know, you like it salty, you don't like it salty, whatever, whatever., if you look at the idea of just blending sounds together as if we might, do with cooking. You blend ingredients in cooking, there's no one set recipe or no one set blend of ingredients. 

One person's carbonara would be awful and somebody else would like it with more bacon. Mixing audio is much the same. It is a taste issue. Yes, you could have bad audio like you could a really bad recipe, but it's not really divisive. Everyone knows what they're trying to achieve. 

Alexa Terry: When you see images of recording studios, there are so many knobs, and I mean the people who usually work there. 

Gareth Henderson: I was tempted.  

Alexa Terry: Maybe there are knobs. I mean, you've probably got some stories, Gareth, which we'll save 

Gareth Henderson: Oh, yes. 

Alexa Terry: for outside of the recording, I think. 

Gareth Henderson: Yep, yep, yep. But what are the knobs actually for? And is it quite necessary to have all of [00:04:00] those? 

So the absolute, I mean, I could definitely offend a bunch of studio owners with this answer, but it's true. And if they can argue all they want, the answer is no, none of those knobs are necessary anymore. None of them are necessary. Some of them are desirable. Some of them add flavours, colours and facilities to the audio that the engineers or the clients might miss if they weren't there. 

I'll try and make that make sense. We live in a world now where there's an awful lot of things in a recording studio that are referred to as virtual. And that literally means that they happen in software inside a computer instead of happening In the real world. , I'm getting on a bit now. Don't tell anyone, but I'm quite old. 

So I go back to when we used to use tape to record everything and the sound would get recorded on stripes on tape. And if you wanted to change what was recorded, you played it back through a piece of, of hardware, you know, wires and knobs, and you needed the knobs because the knob would make something different. 

. And [00:05:00] some of those pieces of equipment sounded rubbish, but some of them sounded awesome and they actually didn't just do their job they imparted a flavour to the sound that was positively desirable., there are some people out there that absolutely love the sound of vinyl records and swear by them. But those of us that understand the way the technology works know that what a vinyl record is doing is altering the sound. It's actually spoiling it, but it's spoiling it in a flavour that some people just love. 

And I would never argue that they shouldn't love it, but it's actually altering the sound from its true sound into a form that we really enjoy. , and I think that's the point is if you really love the flavour that all those knobs in parts, it's going to be something you're always going to want to have on hand. 

The truth of the matter is almost every single one of those processes can now be simulated inside a computer and very often they can be simulated extremely well, which means instead of going into Abbey Road and paying a fortune to use a huge mixing desk, the truth is somebody with a laptop and a little [00:06:00] interface could probably do all of that at home, and with a good set of ears and some expensive software they could probably do just as good a job. 

Lots and lots and lots of top studios now. Do actually mix just what they call in the box, which means it's all mixed in software. And there are lots of big name producers that will mix in the box. And a lot of the reason for that is actually, instant recall ability. If you have a big mixing desk with 72 channels and loads of knobs on every channel, when you want to move from one song to another, you've got to take a photograph or make a note of the setting for every single channel. 

And they literally used to have members of staff that were paid to note what every single knob was on. And when they change to the next song, find the bit of paper that said what every knob was on and off they go. And you could spend hours just getting a mixing desk back to the state it was in from yesterday's session because somebody overnight changed the knobs. 

Whereas with a computer, you just press load and you load that song up and it sounds exactly the way it was last week. So there's a, there's a lot to be said for the, for the instant usability of modern systems and a [00:07:00] lot to be said for the fact that now people that couldn't afford all that gear can get their hands on it to a large extent in software. 

I really want to show you a piece of equipment I have here that's actually called. A big knob. That's its official name  

Gareth Henderson: And it literally is just a big knob. It turns things up and down. It's just to make things louder and quieter. And I love the fact that I've got a big knob. 

Alexa Terry: I think that's a great thing to self declare. 

Gareth Henderson: Yeah.  

Alexa Terry: You're not lying For singing teachers who have an interest in this particular area, Do you have a tip for them to help them train their ear towards balancing and mixing audio?  

Gareth Henderson: What I would say is this, I used to talk to some of my students, because I don't think I mentioned at some point that as well as being a singing teacher, I actually used to teach music tech in a college. 

And so obviously you're trying to give people who really want to be able to do this, but don't, some kind of ideas of how they could look at it. And I use an expression, it's not a real expression. , but forensic listening and what I mean by forensic listening is don't just hear your [00:08:00] favorite song and hear the song. 

Don't just hear the words. Don't just hear the singer. Don't just hear the chords, but actually listen and try and understand everything that's in there. I'm sure a great chef, I go back to cooking analogies and by the way, I'm a terrible cook, but I'm sure a great chef tastes a meal that somebody else has made and go... 

'ooh, notes of, of cinnamon with a little undertone of...', and that's what you need to be able to do. If you're going to be good at using pro audio, you need to be able to listen to that and go, Ooh, all right. Okay. So the bass sound in there, that's not an ordinary bass guitar. That's a synth synthesized bass. 

It's a bit buzzy on the keyboard. It's not a real piano. That's a piano that sounds like it's. playing underwater. And oh gosh that snare drum sounds like it's playing in the Grand Canyon but someone's throwing a pillow over it or something. And if you start listening to what's within even if initially you get a pad and pen and you write down each element that you can hear, and maybe you write down at what point a new element comes in because a big part of making [00:09:00] a professional music production works is things changing all the time until you're aware of it until you're really listening you'll never realize how many times whilst you're listening to your favorite songs something changes or something new comes in it's borderline a rule as to not being able to stay the same for very long before something alters. 

So listening to that and writing down, okay, when it got to the bridge, the hi hat pattern changed and became twice as many hi hats or they started opening the hi hats or, or they stopped using a hi hat and started using a ride cymbal and stuff like that. But learning to listen and hear those things is awesome ear training. 

Alexa Terry: I've tried doing that with my palate when it comes to wine. 

Gareth Henderson: Right. 

Alexa Terry: I could line up four very different drinks of the Prosecco or Champagne kind, and no matter how expensive they are, they will taste exactly the same to me. 

Gareth Henderson: But I think that is, truthfully, that's because that's not really our level of interest. And if for some reason [00:10:00] you actually genuinely had to get to the stage where you could understand that to the nth degree you would study. You would study how to tell what those different things are you can go on wine tasting courses i'm sure you know that Whatever your interest is, once it becomes attuned to the finer details of that, like I said, I'll always be a terrible chef because I won't ever know whether or not I'm tasting turmeric or, or pick a different spice. 

But my point is I could taste a meal and go, that tastes fabulous. But whether or not I could actually take it apart and understand it. And it's exactly the same with audio. You could listen to a new Taylor Swift single and go, I love that track. It sounds great. Why do I love that track so much? My job would be because you're hearing this, this, this, and this, and the energy that you're hearing in the chorus is caused by this, and etc. 

So it becomes about, about refining your palette. And that comes from, yeah, passionately taking things apart, understanding what makes them work. And, and, you know, I'm aware of some of the questions you might be asking me later. And some of that [00:11:00] understanding what you enjoy feeds into some of your later questions. 

Alexa Terry: We spoke with Dr. Nicholas Perna for episode 167 on the topic of understanding nasality and perception in the singing voice. And to paraphrase what he said, He said for decades audio engineers thinking about low range being zero to 5, 000 hertz and high range being above 10, 000 hertz have referred to the, nasal mid range of 5, 000 to 10, 000 hertz and when the, mid range of a singer is boosted on the, mixer that is giving us more of the, perceptual quality of bright and buzziness of twang, even though a singer likely doesn't have nasal airflow or a relaxed soft palate. 

So from your experience with audio engineering and mixing, what would your response be to that? 

Gareth Henderson: It's genuinely an interesting subject. And of course, because I'm also a singing teacher, I've subscribed to most [00:12:00] of the same, mailing lists as you do. And probably saw the, the mailing list that went out when scientists definitely discovered that nasal resonance doesn't actually happen by air flowing down the nose. I saw the pictures of the cotton wall stuffed up there. and I know that, that Dr. Nicholas Perna knows that as well. He discussed it, I think. What I would say as a sound engineer, the first thing I would say, and this is just me splitting hairs, but I don't think you'll find a sound engineer that would consider something up to 5, 000 hertz as being low frequencies. 

Low frequencies are quite a lot lower than that. By the time you've reached 5, 000 hertz, you're already pushing into some serious mid range anyway. Low frequencies is probably everything may be below about 500 hertz. So that's a considerably lower frequency there. The kind of the, the, the, maybe the boomy aspects of the voice would be below that. 

And then you're talking kind of 250 hertz down is where you're going to hear things like a bass, and suddenly 100 hertz down is where you're going to hear a kick drum. The important thing really is that clarity or intelligibility in pretty close to any [00:13:00] instrument lies in that mid range that we're discussing when we talk about the nasality, these nasal resonances. 

Without those frequencies, Sound becomes unintelligible. If I take a perfectly good recording, if I took this recording of us talking, and just reduced all those frequencies in that area where we say that nasal resonance exists, eventually And we'd know some talking was going on, but we wouldn't be able to understand what it was. 

I joked earlier about the sound of something sounding like it had a pillow thrown over it. But very often that kind of muted sound, which we refer to as filtered, is what happens when we lose those frequencies. So conversely, if we accentuate those frequencies, then to a large extent, intelligibility increases. 

So this is one of the reasons why an old fashioned telephone signal, if you, if you think about the sound we call telephonic, we take out all the low frequencies because they're [00:14:00] not necessary for intelligibility. We take out the super high frequencies because they're not necessary for intelligibility. I keep stressing that because they're nice. We like them in pro audio sound. If we take them out, the sound sounds horribly thin. But if all we're talking about is can people understand what we are saying. We emphasize those frequencies. So if you boost them a little on a singer's voice you make their voice clear you make it ringing but in a good way ringing, so all of a sudden the singer whose voice might not have that much cut and excitement Can be made to sound like they've got more cut and excitement by boosting the correct frequencies and once again as with everything in the world balance is important if you over boost them you make their voice sound harsh and potentially depending on where you're boosting sibilant.  

Alexa Terry: I'm going to ask this question a little bit later with regards to the sound production side of things. But when it comes to boosting certain frequencies in the mix, how can [00:15:00] an artist ensure that they're still being faithful to their correct or truthful sound? And as from a singing teacher point of view, how do you then help a singer to work on say, clarity, so that when they go into the studio it kind of marries over so they don't necessarily have to have extra help.  

Gareth Henderson: . So there is an answer to that, but before you answer the question, how do we do it? Like some other things in pro audio, we also should answer the question, should we do it? So if you were listening to a singer who had a less bright voice than some other singers. I give away my age with my references sometimes, but can you remember a band called the M people and a singer called Heather Small? 

So you can hear her voice in your mind. It has a unique characteristic to it. Yeah. And that voice is not particularly crisp and clean. It's kind of a little bit muted, a little bit kind of warm and fuzzy. So if I [00:16:00] could, if I had the tools to make her voice sound the same as everybody else's should I? You know in essence what we're talking about here is all I really should be doing Is to make sure that i've done enough that you can hear her cleanly and crisply over the music and there's multiple ways to look at that. Yes, I could find those frequencies and I could enhance them a little bit within reason what I could also do is I could remove those frequencies from all the music to leave her enough space to come through that music more cleanly And in that circumstance instead of spoiling her voice, like I said, I might give it a little help, but instead of re crafting it to make it something different, we accept the fact that there is a tonality to her voice that might be different but it's still acceptable, it's still nice, people still enjoyed it. 

So we roll with it. I've got some singing students, one particular one whose voice is going through my brain. She had a great range, a great musicality, but almost certainly due to the way that air [00:17:00] was not flowing through spaces in her face that it should have been, her voice was a little more mute than some of the other singers that I worked with. 

And when they were in concerts together, because I was her singing teacher and the sound engineer, I'd see her walking up to a microphone and I'd be like, okay, here we go. And then I dip those frequencies there and boost these here because then her voice will come through the sound system as cleanly as it should. 

And I went to see her in her, end of year concert when she finished high school and the sound engineer was less sympathetic to what he was hearing. And I remember her mum saying, Oh, it was such a shame. I really couldn't hear her singing properly on that song. Her voice was all. And the reason would have been that the sound engineer left that mixing desk, that channel on the mixing desk, exactly the same for her as he did for the singer before her. 

That's not on her, that's on him. He should have done a better job of responding to what was going into that sound system. Should I teach her how to make her voice do it automatically in her singing lessons? Well, to an extent, I've, [00:18:00] I've discussed with her that she could do with brightening her voice herself at source, in other words, using that nasal resonance, and to an extent she has. 

But she's never going to have an identical voice to the other singers around her, just as Heather Small didn't. 

I think what we're looking for here is intelligibility. 

Because outside of intelligibility, we're still talking about taste. You know, this person's voice needs to be brighter. Why? because I like brighter voices. Yeah, but I don't. So what of it? There's a, there's a, what's it called? A shared aesthetic. There's a shared aesthetic issue over whether or not we like that sound. 

I don't think intelligent, personally, this is my shared aesthetic. I don't think intelligibility should fall into that category. If I can't understand what a singer is singing, I'm disappointed. You know, I want that song to break my heart. It won't break my heart if I don't know what it's about. 

Alexa Terry: What would be one of your favourite go to exercises to help a singer to brighten a little bit so that the work at the mixing point is slightly less, I don't want to say invasive [00:19:00] because it's meant to be a balanced thing, but  

Gareth Henderson: so, for me, if I've got somebody whose voice isn't bright for that reason the nasal resonance thing well okay what do we know that takes people's voice to a place of nasal resonance almost instantly every time anything with an N at the front of it. Say for instance they've got a particular area of the song that doesn't feel like it's coming through crisply and cleanly enough getting them to sing that area of the song a bunch of times even in the booth even just as they're about to sing it replacing the lyric with something with an N at the front .The choice of vowel behind the N would be very pitch range dependent. 

I'm sure you and most of these singing teachers know that the vowels are going to respond differently in different places in the range. So I would go for a vowel that was, was a responsible choice based on where they were singing in their range, but giving them something with a NU, Nu, Nu, it's going to bring that resonance to there. 

And I've done this to people plenty of times and they sing that and they sing that and they sing that. And when I think they're ready, I go now sing the lyric. And there we go. We've got a different balance. Now, [00:20:00] sometimes in my recording studio, I'm recording people who aren't my students. So that's one of my fast fixes just to get a result out of someone. 

Obviously with my students I'd like them to play that game in my lessons and then I'd like them to play that game at home until we get to the stage where they don't need to do it in the booth. But you know, if you're sending someone in the booth and they're still scared of a particular section not being crisp enough, that's a good fix to take into the booth with them.  

Alexa Terry: This really highlights the importance of the artist having a really good understanding of who they want to show up as. what personality traits of their voice they want to share with their audience. And so I'd like to understand from your point of view, how you know when you've achieved the end result in a mix that is satisfying to the artist and to the engineering process. 

Gareth Henderson: Wow, that, that question in so many ways is, is, is beyond [00:21:00] too deep to answer, but let me try and answer it. So when do you know you're ready? When do you know it's done? Well, when is a singer good enough? When is a song written well enough? There is no definitive answer to that in terms of trying to have the artist be happy with their result. Clearly one thing I can do as a sound engineer is send it to them and ask them what they think. Sometimes you get back, wow, it's amazing. I'm crying. My family are crying. And I love that because that means my work is over. Very, very often you'll get back. I'm not sure if my voice is a bit too loud, that's a common one, because most singers are terribly insecure and worried that they're up front and all the rest of it. 

 . So sometimes I have to, and I mean this with love, nurse maid them into, into being like confident . Does this actually make you sound bad? Cause it doesn't. Sometimes they're actually right on the money and they don't like something that I've done and they need me to change it. 

Gareth Henderson: And then I've got to get in there and change it. So to an extent from a sound engineer's point of [00:22:00] view, it's about liaising with the client to make them happy. They're genuinely are times. When I'm absolutely sure I've done a great job and the client wants me to change it in a way that I think makes it worse, but it makes them happy. And at that point, you've got to remember, the customer is always right. And even when they're wrong, some of them are wrong. 

Alexa Terry: Yeah, yeah, and it really is that quote from Leonardo da Vinci, I think. Art is never finished, only abandoned.  

Gareth Henderson: I remember sitting, watching George Michael at the mixing desk, talking about an album and just admitting that he, he never thinks it's finished. It just gets to a place where he feels like it's, it's time to let it out, let people hear it and see what they think, but he never thought it was finished. 

This was right in his heyday. I think this was the Listen Without Prejudice album. And you're thinking, the world just went nuts for this album. You didn't think it was done. 

And the other thing is, I suppose, that if you do let it out there when it feels like there was more you could have done, you actually leave some options for people to interpret. There's still some [00:23:00] some thoughts in their head about where it could have been and what it could have meant. The more you definitively nail it, I think maybe the ambiguity goes and art should have varying effects on different people. I suppose so. 

Alexa Terry: To finish off this segment, what would you say is one of the top traits or requirements for being a sound engineer? 

Gareth Henderson: Oh, I mean, we're going to go with the obvious, aren't we? They've got to have usable hearing. If the hearing's damaged, they're in deep trouble. Personally, and again, this could be divisive, but I think that a good sound engineer, both for live sound and in particular for studio production, they should have, They should have a certain, sense of curiosity about what they're actually hearing, but more than that, they should care more about the art that is coming through the sound system than the sound system itself. 

You know, we're all formed by the things that happen to us, but I remember being at a a desk for a sound engineer when a band that I was friends with were on stage and they'd said to me [00:24:00] listen can you just go and stand with the sound engineer when we're on and make sure it's all going okay and it wasn't. I couldn't hear the singer it was you know the mix was bad there was some lovely harmony work going on and it wasn't great and I went up and stood next to the sound guy and the sound guy looks at me and he's really pleased with himself and he's like listen to those subs they sound amazing don't they and he was listening to his sound equipment he wasn't listening to the music coming through it. 

So personally, I think that makes a bad sound engineer. You've got to be asking yourself, is the art, we call it art, you know, the music that's coming through the sound system, is that what's being sold? And there are some, you know, I've met some wonderful sound engineers, by the way, some absolutely incredible ones that have intimidated the heck out of me. 

But they are listening to the result. They're not listening to the technology. So sometimes that might mean something as simple as turning everything down. One of the best sound engineers I ever met said to me, if you're in a venue where the crowd are making too much noise, just keep turning it down so that it embarrasses them into shutting up. 

And that was a genius level of sound [00:25:00] engineering. And this was, this was, there was an orchestra. I was doing a gig with a jazz orchestra and I was singing and he'd set up all the sound equipment and basically he just got the orchestra to play and he only nudged things up when he couldn't hear them out the front. 

So I got nudged up because, you know, I wasn't singing as loud as an orchestra, but the truth of the matter is he wasn't trying to mix everything. He was just trying to get everything into balance and the instruments that were sounding great already. He left them alone.  

Alexa Terry: . Moving on to sound production then, what is that and how does it differ from sound engineering? 

Gareth Henderson: So I think with sound engineering, which sometimes does happen on the end of sound music production, we don't tend to call it sound production, music production, sound engineering is crafting all these different sounds to get them to blend together in a pleasing way. Music production is creating, a soundscape to support a song, not always a song. 

I mean, we could be doing music production film and there might be nobody singing, but generally speaking, if we're talking about, cause this is a singer's podcast, there's probably some singing involved. You're talking about [00:26:00] building a soundscape around a song. So that might be as simple as having a piano that plays along with the singer. But equally, that could be like, I mean, if you think about Finneas building tracks with Billie Eilish, some of the weird soundscapes that they created and the way that they did it. Incredibly involved and, and very beautiful, but that's music production. It's putting together a package of, I'm using the word sound, but we know we're talking about instruments most of the time. So, you know, playing the piano part, writing a bass line for it, putting together some interesting drums, whether they're real drums or whether they're weird and wacky electronic samples. Or as is a fun thing to do these days to take real world noises, chop them up, mince them up and arrange them in an order and call that a drum pattern. 

It's an increasingly common thing to do is to build instrumental parts from sounds that were never designed to be instruments. All of that is music production and then understanding how to, I'm going to use the word sell the song, but I don't mean in the financial sense. I mean, how do we make this song realize its goal? 

How do we make it lift [00:27:00] in the right places and drop away in the other places? That's then part of the music production as well. What instruments do I add to lift the track up? When do I pull everything out to create moments of drama? All that kind of stuff. That's all music production. 

Alexa Terry: This might be too broad a question, but if you could just give us an insight into if somebody is working on recording an audio maybe for the first time, or is just dipping their toe into this, how do they know what instruments to pick for the sound that they're wanting to create? 

Gareth Henderson: So this is, this is like a bit of a passion issue for me because I genuinely deal with people all the time that I've never done it before and they're like, how do I, how do I show you what I want? And the answer is very simple references, get me a minimum of three, preferably more than three songs that have, the thing that you love. 

Now that doesn't mean we're going to steal from it. But if the music that you want to sound like, you can't sit there and describe it. It's too difficult to describe sound. [00:28:00] So find three or five or 10 songs that encapsulate the vibe that you're looking for, the emotion, the soundscape. And then if you want to do it for yourself, sit there and do the forensic listening. 

Why do I love these songs? Why do these have this thing going on that I really enjoy? But if you can't do it for yourself, at least give me a shot at listening to those songs, because there's a pretty good chance I'll go, ah, have you realized that the common thread between all of these is this? So that's what we're going to make sure your song has. 

Alexa Terry: It's really quite similar to when you're helping somebody find their style and you say, who are your favorite artists? What are they doing? I really love a fry on set. I really love breathy tone. I really like riffing. 

Gareth Henderson: 100 percent 100 percent it's exactly that. And it's just for a second, taking it away from the singing and listening to everything except the singing. I shouldn't say that because it might include the amount of use of harmony. You know, some people don't realize they're listening to their song and they don't realize that the thing that's making [00:29:00] that chorus awesome is the that's where the harmonies came in. 

What is it in that second verse that makes that second verse kind of kooky? Well, because they're harmonizing. Just those lines, those lines that are important. That's one of my favorite tricks is take a line you really want people to listen to, and that's the one you harmonize. So these are the kind of things that people don't realize they're listening to until they stop and do that kind of forensic listening test. 

And yes, do it with references. Don't try and describe it to a sound engineer because the words that you might be using just might not make sense to them. Just play them stuff. Ah, that. Yeah, cool. I love that. Oh, that's an 808 kick drum. Great. I'll get one of those. You know, it's, it's so much easier if you just don't, don't describe sound, demonstrate. 

Alexa Terry: Aside from the instruments that we can use, what other effects on vocals can we put on? So like an echo, for example, 

Gareth Henderson: So, , I mean, yes, Echo is great. I personally, I probably [00:30:00] overuse it sometimes. I especially overuse Echo at live performances, But if people aren't using their voice in a way that is rhythmic and exciting enough, then using an Echo that is directly in tempo with the track and mixing it appropriately makes the singer sound like they've got more bounce to their voice than they really have. So using an echo is a way to actually, it's not just a noise in the background, it's a way to create additional rhythmic feel within stuff. 

Probably the most commonly used effect in all of live sound and and more so even in production is reverberation and reverb, or reverb for short. Everyone calls it reverb. I think that reverb is misunderstood by most singers and probably by most producers because what we should call it in a way is space. 

Whenever you're adding reverb, you're putting whatever that sound source is, whether it's a singer, whether it's a snare drum, whether it's a guitar, [00:31:00] you're putting it in a space. And then what you've got to ask yourself is, is that space appropriate and how does that space affect my perception of this sound? 

Why am I saying it in such a weird ass way? Well, if I put a huge cavernous reverb on a beautiful, fragile, delicate love song, I effectively place that singer three kilometers away in the Grand Canyon when they're supposed to be singing in my ear and making me feel like they're never going to leave my side. 

So using completely inappropriate reverb distances that sound source, in this case the singer. But what if I want the snare drum to not be right next to my ear? Because frankly I don't like it when someone hits a snare drum next to my ear. So if I take the snare drum and I put it in the Grand Canyon, then I've moved the snare drum away from my singer. 

You need to understand reverb creates distance, the more reverb, the further away that thing is. So if you add loads of reverb to a singer, you're pushing them further and further back in the [00:32:00] mix, but also the size of that reverb. Is it the reverb of a big space or is it the reverb of my living room? Or is it the reverb of my cupboard? 

You know, if I use the reverb of my cupboard, is that a bad thing? Most of the time, yes. But what if I want it to sound like me and the person I'm singing to are in the cupboard together? You know, real intimacy. can be created by using a small reverb and a small amount of it, because then the voice sounds like it's really close to me. 

So that's a, an important effect. I think understanding reverb and what it really does to a sound is very, very important. It's trickier with live because obviously the room itself also has an effect. You could have a really small reverb on a singer live, but they're in a really big boomy room and Really tough to get around that problem. 

 But yeah, I mean, there's tons of other effects that we can use. There's things like chorus, which makes it sound like there's a bunch of people. It can be horrible if you use badly on a voice. Automatic double tracking, making it sound like there's two of us. There's, there's a, we could go nuts with the different things we could do. Probably we should consider the fact that there are effects [00:33:00] that are just used to reduce the dynamic range of a singer. So if a singer tends to get very loud when they belt their chorus, we have a thing called compression which will make them quieter. 

We can make the, the distance between the quietest sound in a song and the loudest sound in a song, more manageable so that the vocalist always stays in a, in an okay range. You don't suddenly want them to burst out really loud, even if that's what they're doing in real life. Of course, we've talked about, we talked about the frequencies thing. We talked about that nasality, EQ, which equalization, we can make some sounds better. Like more and some sounds less. So if a singer's got a boomy part to their voice, kind of a, uh, uh, uh, sound that's getting a bit too strong, we could EQ that down. Or if their voice doesn't have a lot of warmth, we could EQ it up. 

And again, high frequencies, we could add some for a bit of sparkle, or we could reduce them.  

Here's a fun thing. You can't turn up or down a frequency that's not there. So when somebody's voice literally lacks sparkle, Turning up all the treble in the world doesn't add any sparkle. [00:34:00] But we can still get around the problem, because sound engineers are sneaky. 

We have a thing called an exciter. An exciter is a very specific form of distortion. But what it does is you use it very carefully. Instead of hearing distortion, you hear it effectively synthesize frequencies that aren't in the sound. So you can add 'excitement' Oh, I'm doing hands. You can add excitement to a voice that perhaps doesn't already have enough sparkle to it. 

Sparkle is a very vague description, isn't it? But you can add some detail and some, some kind of brightness that wouldn't exist. Whereas you can't just turn that frequency up if it's not in the voice as it stands. 

Alexa Terry: do you find yourself applying an effect more dependent on style, or is it really to do with the voice individually and the vibe. 

Gareth Henderson: Yes, to all of that. So, certainly, there are some effects that are going to be more predominant in certain styles, that's for [00:35:00] sure. So, I just talked about using a thing called an exciter and said it's a form of distortion. In some styles of music, you actually distort the vocal. You know, you can probably imagine it doesn't tend to be an Adele ballad, but there are certainly forms of music where you might distort the vocal. 

And it's going to sound fabulous. So that's an effect that's kind of style dependent. A favorite Prince track of mine, where he has definitely crunched up his vocal and made it a little bit distorted. Pretty sure it was called Money Doesn't Matter Tonight. But you wouldn't expect Prince to use a distorted vocal, but on that particular track it worked well. It's horses for courses. It's you use these things to create a change that gets you excited.  

Alexa Terry: When someone has recorded the track in the studio, and then they go to perform a a live event, and they're singing that same song, how can those same effects, that same vibe, carry over when a listener has got a particular connection to that when they're listening through, you know, [00:36:00] headphones or whatever  

Gareth Henderson: So this pulls me back to an answer that I gave you earlier. Whether we can sometimes isn't as important as whether we should. Now there are times when the live performance of a song is not as important as whether we should. probably does its best to sound exactly like the studio recording. My personal take is if I'm going to go to a gig where I'm going to pay stupid money, fight my way through a crowd, stand at the back and watch a big TV screen, to hear them play me the CD, they don't have CDs anymore, to play me the stream from Spotify or Apple Music, can I be bothered? 

I don't want it to sound the same. I want it to sound as good But I don't necessarily want it to be the same now. Okay. When there are vocal effects that are so typically an embedded part of the song that we wouldn't really recognize that song with it. I think if Cher goes out and sings, do you believe in life after love? She probably does use that [00:37:00] anyway. We all know that's called auto tune. And weirdly enough, the way that they did that on the original track is not what everybody thinks it is. Cher didn't sing it badly and then pitch correct it to hell to make it sound like that. That's not what it was. She sang it fine. It was in tune. They just forced the pitch correction to do it badly to make an obvious effect. Now you'd feel a bit weird if you went to see Cher live and it didn't sound like that. So maybe they would come up with a technique for making it sound like that, because that feels like that iconic character of the song, but on the flip side, one of the things I, again, I'm sorry, I'm being anecdotal, but there's a, an incredibly famous sound engineer called Trevor Horn. 

Most people don't think they know him, but they know him as the man that sang Video Killed The Radio Star, but he is one of the most iconic music producers of the last 40 probably 50 years in the UK, and he produced an album for this up and coming young singer that no one had ever really heard of at the time called Seal, and he did a fantastic job of that album, and it's an incredibly dense production with so many different things [00:38:00] going on. 

It's got echoes and reverbs and orchestras, and you never know what you're Everything's on there. and I saw Seal do that album live and he did it with a keyboard player who had a piano and an organ and a synth, a bass player, a guitarist that had a couple of pedals on the floor and a drummer that had a perfectly ordinary drum kit. 

None of those songs sounded the way they sounded on the album, but they all sounded great. They sounded like how a great band would play those songs live. He didn't bother trying to recreate the studio recording. He just did a faithful live version of the songs. And I think this is where really good artists actually know that that's not the same job. 

Alexa Terry: Yeah, two different experiences. 

Gareth Henderson: Yeah. And it isn't, that's why you go to a live performance, it's for an experience. 

I don't want the same experience as the other one. That's my opinion. Some people may feel differently. I think often what gets discussed that should a singer sing something in a studio that they can't sing [00:39:00] live? And my answer is, well, to be brutally honest with you, I know for a fact that some of my absolute favourite artists gig those songs in lower keys live because they were pushing their abilities to create as much excitement as they could in the studio and they can't reproduce it over and over and over again live. There are singers, I don't think Stevie Wonder ever changes anything. The man's a complete machine. He's incredible. I don't think I've ever seen Stevie Wonder not do something as difficult as it is in the studio live. But plenty of other wonderful singers do take things down a key or two or three. 

I was stunned to realize I was watching Whitney Houston singing I Have Nothing three semitones down on a, on a live recording. Did not think Whitney ever It was towards the back end of the career, but you know, singers do, they, they do things differently. What are you going to do if that's you singing 16 tracks of backing vocals? 

You could play back all the recordings, that's a thing, sometimes you have a playback track. On the other hand, what if you just have a few band members that [00:40:00] can sing and they just do a great job of some harmonies, but maybe they're different harmonies because that was you singing and you're a girl and you're singing really high and you know, the bass player said he'll join in and do the low octave, but he's not going up where you went. 

Cool, it's going to have a different vibe. It's still, still going to have some harmonies. It just might not be the same harmonies. I think one of the best things is when someone takes their album and goes into preparation for the tour, but they are literally finding out how we're going to put that across. 

Well, what are you going to do with that? What are you going to do when it's a singer like maybe Beyonce or somebody who's, who's going to dance the entire performance, you know, it's going to be a different performance. It's not going to be worse. It's going to be different.  

Alexa Terry: Yeah. 

We talk a lot these days about the multi disciplinary approach and how much we can connect with nutritionists and, physios and all these different people to help us build the artist or support the artist. So when it comes to working with a sound engineer and music producer how much can they get on board to [00:41:00] help with the singer's development to say, you know what, we've had to boost this because this bit is lacking or I guess it maybe make your job a bit easier because you're a singing teacher and you can do that. 

But how much, I guess it alludes to how much vocal tech knowledge would it be helpful for a sound engineer to have? 

Gareth Henderson: . Oh, that's a good one. I enjoyed what you were just saying about how we involve everybody as a team. I just came back from a, from a four days in, in Brisbane with something called the Svara project where the, the core, thought process there was, is about this team approach and indeed having nutritionists. 

And having people that are helping in all sorts of different areas to put it together. I don't think anyone really ever expects the sound engineer to tell the singer how they should do something different. Maybe the brave ones. If you're hired as the nutritionist and then you tell the artist, Hey, you should eat this. 

They're probably going to let you. But I think if you've been hired as the chef and you went out and told the [00:42:00] artist that perhaps they're eating too many bacon sandwiches, there's a good chance you might not be on that tour for long. So I think it is, it's dependent upon how you've been invited into the, into the job, I suppose. 

I wouldn't shy away from telling a non headline artist that they're moving the mic too far away from their mouth when they sing that big note, because whilst you think you're actually helping because you're turning the volume down, actually what's happening is you're thinning out the sound. The spill from the rest of the band is now being picked up on the mic. I'm trying to turn your microphone up so your weediest thing we've heard all night. And now I'm getting feedback and the drums are in it. So yes, I might well have told a thing of that. But they weren't a headline artist. I don't think I'd tell someone really big that because they'd fire me. So there is a sense that you know, you've got to kind of understand when you are genuinely helping and yes microphone technique is one of the key areas. If If a vocal coach hasn't gone in there and helped a singer with their microphone technique Then maybe a sound engineer should.  

[00:43:00] I think one thing that singers need to understand is a program, a process known as compositing, which is usually referred to as comping, which is that we don't very rarely. 

Do we use one take of a singer singing something from the beginning to the end? And although you could go, ah, well, that's just because they can't sing it right all the way through. Sometimes it's actually more subtlety to it than that. Sometimes to get the great job out of someone, they need to almost be in a different physical zone to do the utmost version of the chorus to really kill that chorus. 

They might not be in the same. version of themselves that they were in singing that gentle verse. So sometimes getting people to sing one section, stop and then sing another section isn't because they can't. It isn't because they haven't got the skills. It's because I can help them optimize their voice for the breathy bit and then re optimize their voice for the belty bit. 

And then by adding those two bits together, we can get a better version out of them. Now that's going to help them in the studio. And there's other tricks and to do the same thing. But that's not going to be relevant live. [00:44:00] It's a different skill set there's no compositing live and so they're going to have that different version of the vocal so i think these are things where maybe the engineer can almost more tell the singer what they can do for them this is how i can help you what's left because that's the bit you're going to have to do so maybe we can take some of the workload away by saying how we can help.  

Alexa Terry: What would be your advice to singers and the singing teacher to help prepare for an audio recording? 

Gareth Henderson: , ,so there are certain obvious things like make sure you know your material. 

Going into a studio, still needing to read the words is bad for more than one reason. It's bad because you're not really going to be selling that song with passion, but also you're probably going to be looking down when you should be looking towards the microphone. Definitely if you need to read it off of a mobile phone, I'm not happy because you're staring at this weird little device and that's not [00:45:00] great, but also I'm going to have to remind you to put that weird little device into airplane mode because the microphones pick up that noise otherwise. So knowing your material, knowing it lyrically, knowing where the journey of the notes go, because if you're literally losing the melody partway through, and I say this with love because I've worked with too many singers that don't know. 

It's different if it's a songwriting recording session. If we're making the notes up in the, in the room and now it's right now, pop in there and see if you can sing that. That's different. I'm never going to be mean to someone over that. But if you've been writing an album, prepping it for the last six months, and now you're coming into the studio to do it, you should damn well know your material. 

Obviously, there's the simple things like hydration. How often have we told a singer they've got to make sure they're hydrated? But do they realize that for that studio session on Tuesday, they need to have been making sure they're drinking properly on Sunday and Monday, not just on Monday, on Tuesday morning. 

So there's there's a sensible level of hydration and looking after yourself. And yeah, maybe not going out and getting hammered the night before the studio [00:46:00] session, which people still do. Maybe knowing the language that we talked about, asking whether or not we are, are we comping this, you know, how many takes of that do you need? 

There's certain things that the singer could certainly know that they want in order to describe it to the singer, so the sound engineer. , sometimes you've got to spectacularly fail in order to have risked something, and I think most great artists and producers at some point try something and go, Nope, that really didn't work. In the studio we're quite lucky because we can try really horrible things and then realize they're horrible and hide that production and never hear it again and do a remix etc. 

I also think you know that that willingness to listen to a lot of music I sometimes don't realize just how broad my I'm going to use the word experience of different music is, I guess what I mean is I've listened to an awful lot of music in my lifetime. I've got a broad taste. And I think that's useful. 

Because [00:47:00] even if you only work, say I was a folk music producer, which I'm not. But if I was a folk music producer, and the only music I'd ever listened to was folk, My productions are going to be really bland and really repetitive and never bring anything new. But if I was a folk music producer who for some reason occasionally listened to really cool funk, I might suddenly want to bring in some rhythms into the folk production that are a little bit unusual. 

So I think having a broad and an open minded taste in music. I will often listen to things I don't expect to like and get pleasantly surprised. There are certain big name recording artists who I just know I generally don't like them, but I'll listen to them because my clients want me to. And I'll go, do you know what? 

They're not bad. That's a really good song. That's a great song. I love that production because even the things you assume you don't like, sometimes they sneak in there and they've got some really great qualities. So I think a willingness to listen to a lot of things, a willingness to try stuff and fail miserably, and to pull yourself back from that and come back from it and go, okay, that was a [00:48:00] terrible idea. 

Let's do that again differently.  

 I guess there's an element of that that's, that's patience rather than perfectionism. I think it was Einstein that said, I'm not smarter than everybody else, but I stay with the problem for longer don't let my wife watch this because she'll tell me off, but there's no two ways about it. Sometimes I charge people for one hour of studio time and work three or four or five, because I'm there trying to get what I really believed I could get from that. And that wasn't me that client's fault that was my fault because I knew there was a thing I could make that do but it turned out to be much harder than I wanted it to be. 

And you can probably guess that some of those things I can do quicker now because I've done it enough times that I know. But I think you need to be willing to experiment and to see what what it's going to take to get it there. If you're not prepared to keep going at it and not give in you're probably not going to be a great engineer or, music producer. 

Alexa Terry: And thinking about work for you, you've got a business Vocal Tech. Can you tell us about that? 

Gareth Henderson: Yeah. So, I mean, I get asked sometimes, what [00:49:00] are you, a singing teacher or a music producer? And if you had to choose one or the other, which would you choose? I haven't been able to divorce those two things in such a long time. And I'd, I'd be mortified if I had to, it would make me very sad. The thing about my business is that I am both and I try to do both. 

And sometimes I do both for, for one client. Sometimes I'm those two different things to do different clients. I have a teaching business here. There's a room that isn't the recording studio where I teach singing. Some of my clients come in and say, Hey, you know, I really want to write a song. And I go, well, you can, and they go, no, I can't. And I proved to them that they can. And then we ended up going into the recording studio and recording their songs. When I lived back in the UK, I had a bigger studio than this. And we did do bands a lot. And we also did a lot of voiceover work. So I've actually recorded stuff for Channel 4 and the BBC and Sky News and all that kind of stuff and adverts and things. Haven't done any of that in the nine years that I've been here in, in, Western Australia. 

But I do get to do lots of working with people on [00:50:00] productions for the songs they've written or helping them to learn to write songs. I've been a songwriter since I was 15 years old, and that's a very, very long time ago. But I think I didn't really learn anything about songwriting until maybe the last 10 years, when I started to find out that with the best will in the world and not taking the art away from this, songwriting is a craft. 

There are techniques within songwriting that help make songs work better. And when I started finding that out, That gave me an enormous amount of confidence in taking a song forward. Because I used to think what a lot of singers think, which is, unless I've got a great idea, I'm stuck. And I'm going to sit here and look at my beginning of my great idea for the next three months until I have another great idea to add to it. 

It's nowhere near that complicated. There are functions within songwriting that we can predictably used to carry a song forward. Now, does that mean I'm going to write the biggest smash in the world ever? Am I going to be better than the Beatles? No. [00:51:00] But does it mean that now I can kind of borderline guarantee that if I have to write a functional song, I can write a functional song. 

I can put these processes together and pop out a functional song at the other end. If I want them to be better, I just need to keep doing that because a bit like everything else that we do, if we keep doing it, we tend to get better at it. So I think trying to show people that they shouldn't be scared to do it and that it's not that they can't, they don't know how, just showing them the techniques to help them write songs is really exciting to me. 

I get a real kick out of it and sometimes they make me cry  

Alexa Terry: For singing teachers who have knowledge in this area or passion in this area, how can they maximise this skill for their coaching business? And what would your advice be to people who want to do it but just don't yet have the guts? 

Gareth Henderson: So, I mean, there's, there's a huge amount of information freely available because there's people that are just so generous with the things that they know that will help maybe a singing [00:52:00] teacher become full of the language that they need to pass on to their students to help their students be brave enough to get on with doing some songwriting, or you may even find there's just a singing teacher out there that wishes they could write a song and is afraid to. I think I mentioned earlier about the idea that when we learn that there are just techniques that we can use to, to borderline guarantee that we can drag a song out of this. As a singing teacher, if you study some of this stuff, you don't necessarily have to be writing great songs yourself. But if you've been through some of this information about how to put songs together, and you can then feed that back to some of your pupils who might well go, Oh yeah, I'd love to have an original song of my own. And yeah, for someone like me who also then has some, some music production tools, I can then help them with those songs. 

An awful lot of singing teachers have probably got a computer that will happily run a piece of what we call digital audio workstation, a DAW or DAW. That's the piece of software, in my case I use Logic, but so many sort of musician singing teachers have, have , [00:53:00] a Mac that might have GarageBand. And just learning how to get people into building a song within something like GarageBand without spending a fortune is probably going to have them excited and coming back to do more. So I would really strongly advocate for getting your head around some of the basic tools that we can use to write songs. If you're talking about people that aren't musicians and they're a bit stuck, here's a really useful resource that I was talking to someone about the other day. There's a thing that if you know about it already, it will be boring to you, but TypeBeats. Have you ever heard of TypeBeats? 

So if you go on YouTube and you go, do you know what? I really wish I could write a song that sounds like Olivia Rodrigo. You go on YouTube and you type, Olivia Rodrigo type beat. And that will bring you up a stack of videos where some music producer who doesn't necessarily sing or write vocals has made a backing track in the style of Olivia Rodrigo. And then they put it on YouTube. 

And you listen to it and you write your song over it. Now, [00:54:00] if you have a go and it's terrible, that's the end of it. You just leave it there. But if you write your vocal melody over this type beat and you go, this is awesome. I really wish I could actually sing over this type beat. There'll be a link in that type beat that you can press that will take you through to the website of the person that made the type beat. 

And they will have an amount of money that they would like you to pay them to be allowed to sing over their type beat. And if you love it so much that you think you're going to have a number one hit so you don't want anyone else using that type beat, there'll be another amount of money. And for more money, you can pay for exclusive use of that type beat. 

But in the meantime, what it means is that no one has an excuse to not write a song simply because they can't play an instrument.  

Clearly, further down the line, when you are, you know, releasing your second album, you wouldn't want to be doing it with type beats. You want to be creating this music. But as, as a way to get rid of a stumbling block to start writing, I think they're a fantastic tool.  

 Understanding a little bit about sound engineering and music production allows us to give good advice to our students about what they should be doing. You know, maybe you've, you've been on a local music store's website and you've seen [00:55:00] that they've got this sound system that they might want to use live, these in ear monitors that the client might want to use for gigging, or this keyboard software package that they can use for coming up with their first tracks. 

So just getting an, into a little bit of knowledge so that you've got more to offer your students. The more you offer your students, the more they're going to keep coming back. 

Alexa Terry: You've also given us some, some great resources that will pop some of those in the show notes, but where can our listeners find out more about you and Vocal Tech and maybe get in touch for a session? 

Gareth Henderson: www vocal tech, tech being short for both technology or technique, because those are my two passions. So I mean, the vocal technique around vocal  

Alexa Terry: you're a clever sausage. 

Gareth Henderson: Yeah, so vocal tech.com au because I'm here in Australia and so in Australia, the.com au. Then you can see some, you know, pictures of the studio, pictures of me looking like an idiot in the studio, which is something I do on a regular basis and some information about what we do and how we do it and some some recordings of some of the lovely [00:56:00] students I've been lucky enough to record and the beautiful songs that they've written. And then if you still want to contact me after you've been through all that you can imagine There's some contact details on there 

Alexa Terry: Gareth Henderson, thank you so much. I've come away with a lot of information and some tips there. So thank you so much for sharing your expertise. It's been a real pleasure. 

Gareth Henderson: It's been my pleasure, thank you very much for asking