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Brittany Howard’s lead vocals were, at times, recorded in outlandish ways, as Shawn Everett describes: “Yes, the way we recorded Brittany often was crazy! She realised at one point that she liked singing in the control room, with the speakers going, and in these cases she often recorded her vocals with a handheld mic that she had found on Ebay. I don’t know what mic it was, I just recorded it. On ‘Guess Who’ we used the NS10 woofer, which resulted in this strangely muted tonality, pokey and weird. It’s one of the odder songs on the album, and we wanted to have her vocal sounds a bit differently. I had to EQ it and do a lot of weird jazz to it afterwards, but we used it on the entire song, including her background vocals on it, and it sounded cool.

“We did use some normal mics, with the Neumann M49 probably the most used, and sometimes an SM7 or an AKG C414, but often we were just struggling to get from these what we wanted. So for ‘Gimme All Your Love’, we strapped a headphone to her face which we had reverse–wired so it would record, and while it also required a lot of post–production treatment to make sure the sound didn’t rip your ears off, the end result was cool. There was even one instance when she wanted to get a very muffled sound, which resulted in her experimenting with putting cotton wool in her mouth and even Anbesol [an over–the–counter anaesthetic gel to combat toothache] so she could not feel her mouth.”

Blake Mills: “We recorded Brittany in ways that were a bit dangerous. Brittany is revered as a vocalist, I mean people talk with such respect about her singing, and all this is deserved, but it might mean that people become very careful when they record her and just put a 67 in front of her. But as soon as we started doing the crazy things, I think she, maybe for the first time in her recording-studio experience, felt like she could be herself. She could follow the craziest tangent, experimental ideas she came up with and the people around her wouldn’t look totally confused. So yes, when the idea came up to put the NS10 woofer in front of her, we just did it. Shawn, who is really great at getting guitar tones — he can really get them to explode! — also treated her vocals almost like a guitar, giving them colours that were exciting.”

“Tutti Fruitti” and Cocaine In 1955, Little Richard took only three takes to nail the a cappella introduction to the single that would become his first hit. The song reached number 2 on Billboard’s R&B Best Sellers. It was the beginning of hit after hit including “Long Tall Sally”, “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “Lucille” His music attracted both black and white audiences in the midst of segregation making him one of the first cross over artists. His success brought money and that led to cocaine, heroin and PCP. Richard says at one point he had a $1000 a day addiction. A series of tragedies in the late 70s, including his brother’s death and the accidental shooting of his nephew, forced Richard to give up drugs and alcohol.

By stabbing his amplifier's speaker cone with a pencil, Wray created the distorted, overdriven sound that would reverberate through metal, punk and grunge.