She might have the purest of voices, but Icelandic jazz-adjacent pop star Laufey reckons that she doesn’t need an amazing vocal chain to get good results when it’s being recorded.
Discussing the creation of Tough Luck - a recent single from her new album, A Matter Of Time - on the Tape Notes Podcast, Laufey agreed with her producer, Spencer Stewart, when he suggested that it’s the quality of the performer rather than the gear that matters most, and that it was “shame” rather than necessity that made him upgrade his recording setup.
“The first two [Laufey] albums [Neumann] TLM103 was the microphone - it’s a pretty common mic - and then Steve, our genius, beautiful engineer, who’s mixed all three albums, was like ‘Man, you need to get a better vocal chain.’ And so out of shame, I went and did that. So now we have a [Neumann] U67 going through some preamps and a compressor. And so that’s what you’re hearing on this third album.”
Despite this investment though - the U67 is a significantly pricier mic than the TLM103 - Stewart suggests that he’s always been happy to work with whatever’s available.
“I’ve always produced with an attitude that it doesn’t matter what gear you’re using,” he says. “It matters what notes you’re playing and who’s playing it. I think we could have done the whole thing on a [Shure] SM7 and it would have been fine.
“Different microphones have different frequency responses but so do different cellists,” he points out. “And Lau[fey] has a specific frequency response in her playing and to me that far outweighs whatever mic you put in front of it.
“It’s fun to have these vanity purchases of like, buying a nice microphone - and it does make it sound better - but ultimately, when you listen to the first album, Laufey, are you like ‘Wow, this sounds bad’?”
“Not at all,” replies Laufey, before explaining her own recording philosophy. “People sometimes expect me to be an audio snob because I exude ‘music snob’ sometimes, even though I’m not a snob,” she says. “The thing is, I’m not a snob at all. I don’t even remember the names of the microphones that we’ve recorded on. And sometimes I’ve done ‘clean versions’ [minus the swears] on a voice memo before. I’ve been in a different country and needed to turn the word into something else. I’m so with Spencer on that - I think the phone sounds great sometimes. Sometimes I listen to a voice memo and I’m like ‘whoa.’”
That feeling that all our music-making problems would be solved if we only had that extra piece of gear is certainly one that we’re familiar with. However, as Spencer Stewart concludes by saying, we often obsess about it to distract ourselves from what’s actually important.
“Sometimes thinking about gear can be an excuse not to think about the harder thing, which is ‘are your ideas good?’ It’s harder to make good note selections than it is to have the right microphone, so that’s my take on that.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.