Yannis Philippakis

Having no real constraints on their studio time, Brett Shaw and Yannis Philippakis chose to set up a circle of mics in the live room at 123 to try out different vocal sounds. "Yannis sort of insisted on finishing all of the music before we got into the vocals," says Shaw. "I set up usually six microphones in a circle and he could just sort of skip between any of them at any point. You can just record a bit and see what it sounds like."

The circle of microphones generally comprised a Shure SM7, Neumann U67, Flea 47, an Altec 633A 'salt shaker', an AEA R44CX ribbon and a Yamaha NS10 speaker cone used as a mic. "The ribbon AEA again sounded pretty nice on the softer stuff. And then we messed around a lot on the backing vocals singing through the NS10 cone."