I'd like to know how you'd go about producing the effects on Enya's voice in May it be.

About a minute into the song the effect is pretty strong but it varies throughout.

It's the airy aspect that sounds like blowing over a bottle mouth that I'd like to reproduce.

Sure there's an awful lot of reverb, but there something else, the airyness, that I have no idea how to go about achieving.

I have X2 Producer and nothing else, so I'm especially interested in knowing if it can be done with the included effects.

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.

Thanks stickman393. Yeah, I was wondering how much of it was a lot of air coming out of Enya herself
and possibly a fantastic cathedral or something as well :-)

Sometimes you get the feeling there's like a whole choir singing, but then you realize it's just a single voice.

I'll give what suggest a try, I haven't done anything like that before. Sounds interesting.

I'll see how close I can get my daughter to sound like Enya.

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.

She's breathy in her delivery, but with the right mic and some eq that accentuates the "air" frequencies, this isn't as difficult as you think. Also, if this IS difficult for you, you can blend in whisper tracks singing the lines very lightly in with the original vocal track for a bit more of an air texture. You reverb/eq/compress the whisper track differently than you would the real vocal track and you should be able to get all the breathiness you need. A little trial and error and you should be golden. Just remember, if you do the whisper track thing, the idea is to not hear anything but the air from the whisper. You'll know when you got it right. :)

-Danny 

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.

All of the above. Plus the cathedral - or at least a very nice, very long-tailed, low-diffusion reverb. The choir comes from the reverb "holding" the notes up, while she sings harmonically (along a chord) from note to note.  Note on "May It Be" how there are big pauses between changes to the base chord. This provides space that works with the reverb, so the chords don't clash. It's as if she wrote the reverb time into the song. Anyway, it's pretty inspired IMO.

+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.

hmm...
I was under the impression (from various sources) that the engineers multi-layered her vocals - and that she sings them all.  sometimes up to 100 different layers.
 
http://www.ectoguide.org/genre/mainpop/enya&p=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enya
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A16290434
http://home.global.co.za/~jvd/right_m.htm
 

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.