Enya's airy voice

Once you admit that you kind of need Enya to provide the air movement, I believe the rest can be achieved through creative use of EQ and reverb.

One trick is to take the vocal track, send it to a reverb bus and put an envelope on the send so that only the sustained vowel passages are reverbed heavily. Then put a high-pass on the input to the reverb so that only the higher freq band is reverbed.

Then experiment with variations thereof.

Also, there's some harmony AHHH vocals in the background which I've reproduced in the past by heavy use of pitch correction, followed by similar effect chain as above.

Sorry I don't have samples to share... and I could be way off base, but this is what I would try.

My understanding is that's all Enya, who has an airy voice to begin with. I originally assumed she'd sampled her own voice, but in interviews she's said it's all conventional overdubs. Lots and lots of them.

You can't sound like a good singer if you're not a good singer? Step 1, be a good singer. Step 2? Find out ways to enhance that.

+1 to all the above. 

Good singer to start will who knows how to use her voice.... not just to sing the notes. 

Nice clean recording of said voice.


now... the verb.  In many cases, that is not simply "one" reverb. I have heard of some producers who use multiple reverbs layered and with totally different aural characteristics to get the "finished reverb sound". 

The EQ sounds (on my computer speakers) to be rolled off a bit on the high end. I would assume this was to prevent issues with the long tail reverb being used. Cut the lows and the highs, keep the middle full but not overwhelming.  My guess is the curve would be a nice dome shape...... perhaps flat in the middle. 

just my take on it.

I think you're right, Beagle. I probably spoke too fast about the "choir" -  yes, there is a real choir made up of her own multi-tracked voice. My point was separate from that, referring to the effect of making harmony with the sustaining reverb. I'd say that they're both at play there.

Thanks for all the help people. I added a send on the main vocal to a separate bus with, for the moment, EQ-Breverb2-PC4K S-type compressor ProChannel modules.

That makes for a lot of things to adjust and they all interact a lot.

At first I had just the highs coming out of the EQ but after Guitarhacker's comment I went to a bell shape and it does sound better. I've also found that compressing the heck out of it seems to help, but the noise floor is then pretty bad.

When I bring this buss into the mix there is a very distinct point between a voice that is too up front/small room and a voice lost in space. A point where the voice just fills out, really cool.

I still have to play around a lot with this, but I can see where things are going. I like Danny's idea of adding some whispering air as an overdub but that will have to wait for my daughter to get around to recording that. Her voice is not at all airy (she's an alto) so that doesn't help.

And I'm not sure she'll appreciate what I've done to her voice :-)

but in interviews she's said it's all conventional overdubs. Lots and lots of them.

That's what I've heard/read in the past...
LOTS of overdubs...
The "airy" version of Queen's overdub/stacking techniques.