The British prog-pop outfit 10cc is best known for their hit song “I’m Not In Love” from 1975. It was ahead of its time. And part of what made this song so good was an interesting technique that the band used to make those vocals pop.
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How 10cc Made the Vocals in “I’m Not in Love” Sound So Beautiful
So, how did 10cc get “I’m Not In Love” to sound so stunning? It took a level of creativity and ingenuity necessary in an age where digital audio manipulation did not exist.
To get that vocal track to sound so ethereal and heavenly, all four members of that band had to put work in. Eric Stewart recorded himself, Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley, and Lol Creme singing a simple “ah” 16 separate times for each individual note of the chromatic scale. If you do the math, that’s 48 separate vocal tracks, built up into a choir of dozens of voices.
To avoid the potential for the notes to go on infinitely, Creme recommended using tape loops. And that’s precisely what the band did. Stewart ended up creating loops that measured around 12 feet in length, fed from the stereo recorder through a capstan roller. It was a very DIY experiment, but it paid off. The technique Stewart used effectively drowned out the “blips” at the end of the recordings via the backing track.
10CC Went the Extra Mile To Create a Wall of Ethereal Sound
I’ll do my best to explain this next step in their process without getting too technical. Essentially, Stewart had 12 tape loops, each representing one of the 12 notes on the chromatic scale. Stewart then played each individual loop through a different channel on his mixing desk.
This, when you think about it, turned the mixing desk into an entire musical instrument. He would fade three or four tracks at a time to create chords with the vocal tracks, with additional backing vocals playing constantly in the background. It’s wild to think that making good music took this much work back in the day. One could easily mimic this effect with a digital sequencer today, or possibly a vocoder.
But man, did that analogue effort pay off. The vocals on “I’m Not In Love” are absolutely heavenly. Later on in the recording session, the band’s secretary, Cathay Redfern, popped in and whispered something to Stewart. Creme loved her voice and convinced her to record that iconic line, “Big boys don’t cry.”
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
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