On the Nancy Sinatra track “Bang Bang” (or at least the Audio Bullies version of it that was out recently - I’m not familiar with the original) what kind of recording technique is used on the vocal to get that really intimate sound, where it’s almost like she’s singing inside your head? It’s hard to describe the effect, but if you hear the song, you’ll know exactlky what I mean. Is it some kind of compression or phase shifting or what?
It sounds like it is compressed along with having a healthy dose of reverb.
The song is a Sonny Bono composition, and was originally by Sonny & Cher. Nancy Sinatra did a lot of work with [url=http://web.inter.nl.net/users/wilkens/]Lee Hazlewood**, who did a lot of pioneering studio production work. Famously, he created Duane Eddy’s guitar sound by recording him in an empty grain silo. All sorts of things have been used to produce reverbration effects, from a speaker and a microphone at opposite ends of a long corridor, to singing in stairwells and tiled bathrooms, and I’m pretty sure Hazlewood has tried them all. And of course tape loops, spring-line reverbs, the wonderfully named bucket-brigade delay, and most recently, digital effects.
See also Sun Records’ Sam Phillips for pioneering use of echo and reverb, and also Phil Spector, who studied Hazlewood’s recording techniques to hone his own sound.