In this version of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, she seems to be singing without any musical accompaniment for the first 44 seconds or so. That seems to be an incredibly long time, and I wonder if anyone else ever had a similar feat.
(For the purposes of this thread, “musical accompaniment” does NOT include a capella singing. I see that as a musical accompaniment, except that the music comes from voices instead of objects.)
If any posters tell me that when Houston recorded that song, she was wearing a headset that provided her with the music to help her stay on key, well, okay, I suppose some might say that disqualifies her from this thread. But I don’t know if that’s how it happened. And the final production is still quite impressive. And I’d still wonder if anyone else has done anything similar.
Yeah, that’s the (popular) DNA remix. The album has an a capella version. The remix was originally released, without her or her music people’s permission as “Oh Suzanne.” Her record company, though, decided to buy it and release it themselves instead of suing DNA.
Interesting side note: the original a capella version of the song was used to test new digital compression technologies in the late 1980s, making it the first song converted to mp3.
Also, I prefer Suzanne’s voice to Whitney’s. It’s less technically impressive, but more emotive.
OP, if you already know this then I apologise for the irrelevance, but classical singers are often required to sing pieces several minutes long with no other musical input and stay on pitch. Admittedly this is usually in a group, but it can also come up in solo work. So while I would agree that achieving this is impressive, it’s not particularly unusual or remarkable for professional singers. It just takes a good ear and (in most cases) lots of practice.
it is of course also possible that post-production editing equalised the pitches in the example you mention, but I have no idea whether or not that was the case.
Like the example given in the OP, here’s a song where the singer sings unaccompanied for the first 40 seconds, and then the music kicks in (and I mean kicks):
IIUC, yes it does. “A capella” means, by definition, any singing without instruments, whether it’s one person solo or a group.
It may not be long enough to count for what you’re looking for, but Styx’s “Renegade” starts with about 20 seconds of solo a capella singing, then 20 seconds of group singing, before the instruments kick in.
Yes, “a capella” can absolutely be a vocal solo without instrumentation. Isolated vocal tracks from multi-track mixes are often referred to as “acapellas,” as well.
The difficulty with finding popular music examples is that solo singing without musical accompaniment simply isn’t that popular to begin with. I would say any reasonable singer should be able to hold a tune without external input.
