Catherine Marks walks through two core parts of her vocal workflow on a Manchester Orchestra mix: manual de-essing and building a layered effects chain.
Instead of reaching for a de-esser plugin, Marks draws out sibilants and breaths by hand using volume automation. She works collaboratively with the artist to calibrate how much to pull, letting the singer's own sensitivity to the sound guide the decisions.
The effects chain is built from several parallel layers imported from a previous session: a bright reverb, an EchoBoy delay, and a quarter-note EchoBoy set to the Space Echo setting with heavy feedback. Several of these are side-chained to the click track so the reverb pumps in time with the song, rather than decaying freely.
The two vocal spin layers each pair an EchoBoy ping-pong delay with an Avid Mod delay behind it. With modulation depth set to zero, the modulation delay isn't modulating in the traditional sense – it adds slightly different delay times on left and right, so its repeats blend with and offset the ping-pong's own repeats. Different echo layers stack on top of each other, and because the EchoBoy is on the Space Echo setting – which already carries an inherent tape instability – the combined result takes on a diffuse, swirling, floating quality.