If you ever wondered what it’s like to be in the recording booth with Ariana Grande, the singer has just the thing for you. On Tuesday (April 6), Ari shared yet another behind-the-scenes video of the sessions for her Positions album. The nearly five-minute clip is a master vocal class, with Grande displaying the meticulous, often tedious work that went into crafting every single note on the chorus of the album’s title track.
With the camera angled just below and outside the vocal booth’s glass window, we get to see Grande patiently stacking her ad-libs as she makes suggestions about how to achieve the effect she’s after. “Okay, I don’t know what I did but let me double it,” she says to the engineer as she tries to find the sweet spot on the chorus in the clip that she described as “some more footage from the making of ‘positions’ for u vocal arranging, stacking the bridge,” in a tweet.
Switching her approach just a bit, she adds two, then three more vocal harmonies, stopping at one point to let her producer know that she may have hit the same not too many times. “Okay, it’s going to be messy, but can I hear everything back together,” she asks as the song appears to be coming together to her satisfaction.
Ever the perfectionist, though, she wonders if she could get just one more note on the “yeah” part of the refrain, in the video sequel to an earlier clip of the recording of the song’s outro . The clip is further proof that Grande is firmly in charge during her sessions, as evidenced by her in-the-moment requests to move sections around and keep other bits blank so she can add something in later.
“That’s f–in’ tight,” she says, finally satisfied at the end as co-producer London on da Track looks on confidently
Watch the video below.
