To save you the time of doing a long search on these boards I’ll tell you 2 facts:
*I firmly believe that ANY artist with ANY talent has NO excuse (with the exception of filming a music video) to lip sync.
*Paul McCartney (with/without the Beatles, and/or, with/or without Wings) is one of my absolute FAVORITE artist!
So…!
Did SIR Paul sync ANY part of his performance during the Super Bowl?
I don’t play, but both of my sons do!(ages 24 & 19). And they pointed out that his fingers never once moved, slid, or even twitched, not even once, while he was “playing” his violin bass.
I was watching his fretboard hand closely. The pivot technique that is recommended for electric bass can make the hand appear relatively still. This isn’t to mention the number of notes available within such a short distance of the thumb. Upon a quick test on my own bass within the position McCartney was playing, I am 99% sure that he was playing the right parts.
It was hard to hear him, though. Maybe this was a fault of the sound people? And I did notice that he kept playing mid-wave a little past the middle of the performance, though this could have been done while keeping time on an open string.
To tell you the truth, at the Super Bowl, there may be an excuse. Stadiums are awful acoustically, and with the lights, noise and screaming fans, you probably can’t hear shit. Doesn’t exactly guarantee a good performance with a billion people watching. That said, I think he was actually playing. And if anybody is actually used to that kind of environment, it’s Paul McCartney.
I doubt it. He has an attitude of “If I make a mistake, you’re gonna hear it.” As far as his bass, it’s not unusual for performers to have another musician fill in. Elvis did it. Even B.B. King has another guitarist play when he sings. Somebody obviously played bass when Paul switched to the piano.
Paul’s a good bassist. He’s not Victor Wooten, or Ray Brown, but he’s as good as Sting on bass.
His fingers were in fact moving about on the fretboard in a way that appeared to match the notes being played. His lips also matched up very well with the lyrics, including pauses and such. I’d vote for his actually performing the songs live. On the other hand, they don’t come much more veteran, so he might just be that damn good.
I’d bet the farm he was playing for real. This is Paul McCartney we’re talking about here.
This reminds me of a question that came up last night. Has he been playing the exact same bass since the early Beatles days? Not the model, but the bass itself. I’m sure he probably has more than one, but for example, the one he played on Sullivan, does he still have that? Does he still play it?
I play. It looked to me like his hand was moving enough to be playing. You simply don’t have to move your hand down the neck of a bass nearly as much as a guitar. So long as you can reach the first 5 - 7 frets, you’re all set. Pretty much.
I can’t judge if he was playing his bass (I really couldn’t HEAR his bass), but there’s no way he could have been lip-synching. If he had, the sound would have been cleaner and clearer. His voice was strong and pleasant enough, but he strained just enough on some notes to make me sure he was singing live.
And if he was singing live, I can’t imagine why he’d fake it on the bass!
Of course, if he WAS just pretending to play the bass, that may have been just his tribute to the Beatles’ original bassist, Stu Sutcliffe, who usually faked it!
I believe that’s the Hofner violin bass you are talking about. I went to see Paul McCartney’s world tour in 1989, and he used that bass for the tour. I remember an article about it in the concert program.
Coincidentally, the concert was held in Foxboro, MA where the Patriots play.
He was definitely playing. If you watched his fingers, he was moving them all the time. Even when he was doing the wave thing, you could see that he was just strumming the open string.
My son, who’s a a professional guityarist, says he was playing, and that’s usually good enough for me. But I thought the singing was lip-synched myself.
It was lip-synced. No one can lip-sync perfectly, and if the camera stays on them long enough, you can see when it turns into lip out-of-sync.
Just because it sounds real doesn’t mean it’s not pre-recorded. These people are savvy enough to have Paul sing as though he were performing in a giant stadium and to record it so it sounded less than perfect.
That whole Alicia Keyes thing was lip-synced as well. Why aren’t people complaining about this round of fake singing like they did with A. Simpson and A. Franklin? Is it because Keyes and McCartney were just better at it? It’s okay as long as it’s somewhat convincing, I guess…
When you record in an audio studio, you have complete control over acoustics, sound and mix. If you don’t like what you hear, you can do it again, re-mix it or add to it in multiple takes. None of this is possible in a live environment.
That is why, 99%+ of the time, music performances on film are recorded for audio in a studio and lip-synced on film or video (except for most concert, “live” recordings, of course). Did you really think you were hearing the voice of that singer dancing down the street as he was gyrating, spinning and doing cartwheels?
Nope, ain’t got none. Just used my eyes and ears. Took a few days for Aretha’s camp to admit to lip-syncing, even though it was obvious. Maybe in a couple of days someone will admit to yesterday’s sync-fest.
