How Charli XCX got the blown-out vocal sound on BRAT

The lead vocal on "360" feels like it's already been through the PA. Charli's voice is bright, locked to the grid, faintly clipped at the top, and pushed forward so hard it feels like the speaker cone is the next thing about to give. It's the sound of the whole record: aggressive, hyper-present, deliberately a bit broken.

That sound is a chain of choices made in Logic, before anything ever hit a mix bus.

The Logic-first workflow behind BRAT

Charli, A.G. Cook and George Daniel built BRAT inside Logic Pro, with Serum doing most of the synth work, then stemmed sessions out for mixing in Pro Tools. As George Daniel put it on the Tape Notes podcast, "we did everything in Logic on this track and then I just stemmed it in Pro Tools and then just tidied boring stuff like clicks and pops and messes and put nicer plugins on and all that stuff, but it's the same like aesthetically."

The "aesthetically the same" part matters. The vocal tone you hear on the record was already baked in at the production stage. The mixers (Geoff Swan, Tom Norris, Manny Marroquin, and Gesaffelstein on "Sympathy is a Knife" and "Talk Talk", per the Discogs credits) were finishing a sound, not inventing one. Vocal engineering across the album is split between A.G. Cook, Cirkut, Finn Keane, George Daniel, Hudson Mohawke and Jon Shave, depending on the track.

The practical implication is simple: if you're trying to achieve this sound, the blown-out vocal sound lives in your tracking and production session - not in a magic mastering plugin at the end.

Auto-Tune as the tracking sound, not the fix

Charli tracks with Auto-Tune on, as the sound she's singing into rather than as a corrective afterthought. She told Tape Notes (via MusicTech), "I could sing in tune, but now I think I've gotten so lazy because I sing with Auto-Tune all the time." A.G. Cook, on the same podcast, framed BRAT as a record that swings between extremes: "there are those hard-tune moments, but there are a few where there is really nothing and like barely any vocal production."

The hard-tune moments are the ones that read as "club-loud": "360", "Von dutch", "365". The pitch correction is set fast and aggressive so notes snap to the grid with audible artefacts on the consonants and vowel transitions. That snap is half the timbre. It tightens the vocal until it sits like a synth lead inside the mix.

To get close in your DAW, put your pitch correction plugin (Logic's built-in Pitch Correction, Antares Auto-Tune, or Waves Tune Real-Time) on the vocal as you track, not after. Set the retune speed to its fastest setting, set the scale to the song's key, and sing into the artefact. If you wait until comping to add it, you'll hear yourself fighting the plugin instead of leaning into it.

Photo by Marc Schulte on Pexels

The deliberate "human on top of perfect" thing

George Daniel described the album's tension to MusicRadar (quoting Tape Notes) like this: "When something is innately electronic, you then want to find imperfection somewhere else. So you're either chasing out-of-tune LFOs, pitching keys or in vocals."

That's why the hard-tune lead lives next to messy gang vocals. Charli, in the same Tape Notes session, wanted the group shouts pitchy on purpose, citing Gucci Mane's "Lemonade" as the reference: "I immediately knew that I wanted it to feel pitchy, I think that was the charm." A.G. Cook, in the Recording Academy Grammy roundtable, summed up the lead vocal philosophy: "There's something about how she's navigated the catchiness and the production of the vocals; it's being messed with but it's still really raw."

Practically, that means leaving your background vocals off the lead's grid. Stack three or four passes that aren't pitch-corrected at all, pan them wide, and let them argue with the locked-tight lead in the middle.

Saturation is what makes it sound loud

The "blown-out" part of the BRAT vocal goes beyond volume. It's harmonic distortion sitting on top of an already-compressed signal, which is what makes the vocal feel like it's clipping the air around it.

In the Tape Notes Logic session walkthrough for "Club Classics", George Daniel runs the UAD Thermionic Culture Vulture on a stem (documented on Equipboard from the video). The Culture Vulture is a high-gain valve distortion: Universal Audio's product copy describes "up to 20 dB of gain on tap" with a Dry/Wet blend for parallel processing. Thermionic Culture themselves describe the three distortion modes plainly: Triode for warming, Pentode 1 for "more aggressive" odd harmonics, and Pentode 2 as the "No Holds Barred" setting that throws an extra octave in at higher bias.

If you don't own the Culture Vulture, and you don't need to. The principle to copy is parallel valve-style distortion with a wet/dry blend, not that exact plugin. Almost every DAW now ships with a saturator that can do a usable version of this:

• Logic Pro: the stock Distortion II or the Phat FX saturator module, with the mix knob pulled back to around 30 to 50 percent.
• Ableton Live: Saturator in Analog Clip or Soft Sine mode, Dry/Wet at 30 to 50 percent, drive cranked until you hear consonants spit.
• FL Studio: Fruity Waveshaper or Fruity Soft Clipper into a parallel send.
• Reaper: JS Saturation or any free clipper on an aux.

Two saturator instances in series sound closer to the BRAT thing than one with the drive maxed. Hit the first lightly for harmonic warmth, then push the second hard for the audible breakup. Compress before the saturators (any 1176-style plugin will do, with fast attack, medium release, 4:1, gain reduction around 6 to 8 dB), then EQ after to tame any harsh build-up around 3 to 5 kHz that the distortion will inevitably add.

What the chain looks like end to end

On the vocal track itself, in this order: pitch correction with fast retune, compression around 6 dB of gain reduction, the first saturator at moderate drive with the mix around 40 percent, a second saturator (or a clipper) pushed harder with the mix lower, then a corrective EQ pass with a wide cut somewhere in the 3 to 5 kHz region and a high-pass below 100 Hz.

Track in with all of this on. Print it. Commit to the sound the way Charli and A.G. did, so the mix decisions later are about placing the vocal, not rescuing it.