"Enter Sandman" Isolated Vocal

To end our isolated vocal week we listen to Enter Sandman by Metallica. Here's what to listen for:

1) Finally a great sounding vocal. Excellent tone and ambience, which is difficult sometimes to achieve in a hard rock mix. The compression is just the right amount and you hardly ever notice it. All in all, a great engineering job by Randy Staub.

2) James Hetfield's vocal is perfect. I don't know how much time they took to record it, but I couldn't hear a single fault, even listening with microscopic ears.

3) Listen to how the vocal track was cleaned after a lot of phrases in the beginning of the song. It almost sounds like it was gated. This kind of thing used to be done a lot on tape in the "old days" with a function called "spot erase" where you'd erase any unwanted noises between stuff you wanted to keep. It was very tricky to do and you had to be oh so careful that you didn't erase anything because then it was lost forever. Then console automation came along and no one ever used it again.

4) Once again you hear some track sharing going on when the guitars pop up during the song. In the days of magnetic tape, you had a limited number of tracks and you had to find space where ever you could for if you had a lot of overdubs. It really made for a crazy mix.

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