Jack Antonoff is, to be fair, rather more talented than most people. Possibly everyone. He's a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and record producer, and has worked with huge singers including Lorde, Lana Del Ray and, most notably, Taylor Swift.
When Antonoff reveals his studio secrets and some of his favourite vocal plugins, you have to sit up and take notice
Antonoff has been a big part of Swift's meteoric rise over the last decade, starting a song writing and production stint on fifth album, 1989, that has lasted right through to 10th album Midnights, for which he won two Grammys (out of the ten he's won in total).
If you're not already seething with Jealousy – we know we are – Antonoff has also played a key role in the re-recordings of early Taylor Swift albums, fronted his own successful bands (Bleachers, Fun. and Steel Train), set up his own music festival, and raised money for charity. Even more annoyingly, he's probably a really nice guy too.
So when Antonoff reveals his studio secrets and some of his favourite vocal plugins, you have to sit up and take notice. He's done just that in a recent Tape Notes podcast in which he runs through some trusted techniques and reveals some more unusual plugin uses.
One of the big (and more pleasing) takeaways is that Antonoff reveals that he doesn't mess around too much, and is not one of these producers to dwell too long on one process. Finally we do have something in common with him, then – he has a low attention span like ours.
Antonoff also loves to create vocals stacks using plugins like Waves Morphoder and iZotope Vocal Synth, saying : "I just fuck around until I get these weird stacks".
Jack is, to be fair, talking more about he processes his own voice in the podcast – you might not get too much detail on how to become the next Taylor Swift – but it's an interesting process, nonetheless, all about creating different vocal characters using extreme processing on one voice rather than having to get other singers in to record.
He demonstrates this approach with Soundtoys Little Alterboy, changing the formant and then applying vast amounts of automation for variations on the theme.
"You look at my sessions, I'm drawing shit like crazy, anywhere I can," he says of this automation.
Other studio gear favourites revealed by Antonoff in the podcast include more Soundtoys plugins (Tremolator and FilterFreak), plus synths including the Korg M1, various Moogs and a Teenage Engineering OP-1.
You can enjoy the short version of Jack's revelations for free here, or below, or sign up for the longer version here.
