WAVES OVox £120
Given that the human voice is the most immediate, primal and readily available musical instrument, it’s no surprise that it’s almost always the focal point of non-instrumental tracks. Whether your song is a simple piece for vocals and piano or guitar, or a multi-track behemoth for a raucous rock ’n’ roll band, a full orchestra or with electronic layers aplenty, the vocal line is most likely the part your listeners will be humming in the shower the next morning. And, for as long as recording tech has afforded the opportunity, this has meant that creative producers and performers have looked for ever-more elaborate ways to use hardware and software to make their vocal parts stand out.
Think about vocoding, used on classic records such as ELO’s Mister Blue Sky from 1977, the weird and wonderful warped and portamento’d Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys in 1998 or the extraordinary Jacob Collier’s Time Alone With You from late last year, to pick three of many examples from the past 40 years. And indeed, consider auto-tuning, first finding spectacular success in its most extreme form with Cher’s Believe and then drifting in and out of fashion in the years since.
As always, the records that have managed to capture the zeitgeist are the ones that have wilfully avoided the ‘intended’ purpose of the available technology to squeeze, push and catapult it beyond its boundaries, apply it to the ‘wrong’ sounds, or use other techniques to tease out results that the world has never heard before.
Waves OVox – as its name
