‘Soundbreaking’ Recap, Episode 3: The Struggles Of Capturing The Human Voice On Tape

Helmed by legendary fifth Beatle Sir George Martin, the PBS documentary series Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music deep dives into the art and history of recorded music. Currently available for streaming on Hulu, the show talks to producers, recording engineers and musicians, explaining how music is recorded, and why the recording studio is a creative world unto itself. Episode 1 looked at the role of music producers, while Episode 2 explored the limitless artistic possibilities of the recording studio. Episode 3 talks about that most affecting of all instruments: the human voice, or as the episode is titled, “The Human Instrument.”

While nearly everyone is born with the capacity to sing, being able to do so on the level of an Christina Aguilera or a Sam Smith is as difficult as mastering any instrument, if not harder. Whereas the player can hide behind his instrument, the singer must emotionally bare all. If an instrument goes out of tune, it can be easily remedied. If a singer’s voice gets tired and wanders off pitch, the only way to fix it is with rest and relaxation. And while a singer needs no electricity beside the spark of life to make a sound, a good vocal take is often the most difficult thing to capture in a recording studio.

The great singers mix “technical excellence and complete emotional freedom,” according to Adele’s producer Paul Epworth. He illustrates this point by playing the singer’s unadorned vocal take from her hit “Rollin’ In The Deep. It’s all there, the cracks in her voice, the gritty low notes, but also the unwavering pitch and full bodied voice itself. If she pushes a note sharp, it keeps climbing to a soaring high note. The best singers know how to deliver an emotional payoff few instrumentalists can deliver as well.

As Bonnie Raitt says, a good vocalist knows how to let their vocals “wrap around a melody.” Raitt traces this impulse back to singer Bessie Smith, known as “The Empress of the Blues,” whose music Eric Clapton calls “Nothing but pure emotion.” If anything, that description sells her short. True, she could bend notes as well as any guitarist and fill a lyric with appropriate joy or pain, but she also had a powerful delivery and could sing a tune with perfect pitch. Her influence echoes down from Dinah Washington to Aretha Franklin to Amy Winehouse. Like Smith, Winehouse had an “immense voice that could unload incredible power on a dime,” according to producer Mark Ronson, and was also able to turn personal tragedy into passionate music.

Recording vocalists has never been easy, especially in the old days when they had to fight to be heard over the din of their backing bands. With the advent of electrical recording, came the microphone, which not only gave them a leg up volume-wise, but could also capture subtle vocal nuances. In the hands of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, the microphone actually became an instrument, adding drama and dynamics to a performance depending on close they sang into it.

Not all singers have great voices. Soundbreaking wisely includes such vocalists as Neil Young and Tom Waits, neither of whom has a conventionally beautiful voice, but can still pack a vocal with feeling that hits you in the gut. As producer Peter Asher says, “It’s not just being good, its being unique.” It would have also been interesting for them to examine non-traditional singers, such as rappers and those found in extreme metal, however, for whatever reasons they chose not to.

No discussion of the great vocalists of pop music is complete without discussing the great Aretha Franklin. With lessons learned in the choir of her father’s church, few singers have ever packed as much vocal firepower into a pop song as “The Queen of Soul.” Her segment is followed with a performance by Ray Charles, and while the connection is obvious, Soundbreaking makes no mention their shared background in African-American gospel music. It’s a curious omission, considering how profoundly it influenced both their vocal styles and music.

“The Human Instrument” then explores the difficulties in recording vocalists. If you’ve ever experienced the panic of being asked to sing in public, you have a good idea why many singers freeze up in the recording studio. Singers are just as insecure as anyone else. As The Who’s powerful frontman Roger Daltrey tells it, the one thing all the singers he knows have in common is “none of them like their voice.” (Except Rod Stewart, apparently.) When a singer is performing live, they can feed off the excitement and enthusiasm of the crowd, but in the vocal booth it’s just you and your voice, which is usually too loud in the headphones.

If cutting vocals is as hard as it ever was, technology has created a new world of options for people who want to “fix” their vocals and make them sound “better” or different. With Auto-Tune software, anyone and anything can be put into perfect pitch. And while hip hop artists like Kanye West use it to great effect, it can also rob the music of the emotional resonance vocal imperfections imbue a song with. As Nile Rodgers used to tell Madonna, “Give me as much emotion as you can because I don’t have any button that I can push that can put that in.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Watch "The Human Instrument" episode of 'Soundbreaking' on Hulu