Have a looky here.
I haven’t listened to them all yet. Kiss are surprisingly harmonic. The iconic scream of Daltry at 7:00 in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” seems really watered down without the musical accompaniment.
And Plant still sounds like a school girl.
I never realized how good KISS was at harmonies.
Or, it’s possible I should say, how good their producer was. Who knows?
Kiss doesn’t surprise me. They are an immensely talented band. The whole lowest-common-denominator thing is an act - they wouldn’t be so good at it if they weren’t a whole lot better than they seem.
I WAS surprised at how rough Freddy Mercury sounded on Bohemian Rhapsody, however. Not bad, per se, but not as good as I would have expected.
As far as Roger Daltrey - The Who has always been my favorite band, and I always knew the guy couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but dayum! I’d been kind of wondering if Pete wrote “Getting in Tune” as a jibe at Roger… I think the scream stands up, though.
One of my favorite isolated vocals is David Lee Roth’s from Runnin’ with the Devil, which is a song I love so much that for years I thought I really liked Van Halen. Mainly it’s just that song. The vocal track sounds really funny on its own, but provides some kind of cosmic lesson on making sure to keep things in their proper context:
Runnin’ with the Devil: Van Halen - Runnin' With The Devil (Official Music Video) - YouTube
Vocals Only: david lee roth running with the devil (vocals only) 1978 - YouTube
(Why Eddie Van Halen thought that outfit was a good idea still remains a mystery, however.)
My favorite song to sing along with is Alive by Pearl Jam, so I checked out the isolated vocals for that one. Verdict: Eddie Vedder is truly a rock god. Pearl Jam - Alive (vocals only!) VIDEO - YouTube
Those vocals remind us that Nancy Wilson is one of the greatest rock vocalists ever.
Ann Wilson sang Barracuda. Nancy can sing, but typically doesn’t, and is a great guitar player. Ann, yes, just kills on that vocal.
Interesting to hear the few I listened to. Kinda stunned that anyone would think that Freddie’s tracks for Bohemian Rhapsody are only Meh. They sound wonderful to me.
As for Kiss’s harmony work - I would like to know a bit more about that isolated track. I am NOT saying they can’t sing harmony - Paul is a fine singer when he isn’t pushing it, and can put a harmony over Gene’s serviceable vocals. But a lot of the tracks that are isolated still have a bit of echo or other effects on them. In the case of the Kiss vocal track, it sounds like a fully “blended and bounced” track - meaning they recorded a few vocal tracks and then put all of them in their final edit onto one master track in order to free up other tracks for instruments. So that vocal track sounds like it could have backing singers, guide tracks, and other effects all baked into it.
Indeed. Wonderful range of textures, technique, and feeling. I thought he knocked it our of the park there.
The guitar, on the other hand is…not really anything without the rest of the instrumentation and/or vocals.
Smells Like Teen Spirit…the major thing I notice is how much easier it is to UNDERSTAND the lyrics…so it wasn’t so much that Kurt was kind of incoherent as the instrumentation was partially drowning him out.
Won’t Get Fooled Again is…kind of boring without the instrumentation. Not so much a knock on Roger’s singing, so much as…holy cow, that was a lot of silence.
Didn’t listen to the others, as I wasn’t actually familiar with the songs in their usual form.
I expected to see a mention of the fantastic isolated vocals for *Because *and the Abbey Road Medley but I guess Universal Music is pretty proactive in taking down Beatles stuff when people post those kind of clips.
Bruce Dickinson sounds a bit like a madman in a cave for Number of the Beast. I might not be able to not hear the echos the next time I listen to the song.
I saw surprised at how well my brain filled in the music when I was listening to some of those songs.
Maybe Freddie’s rep has set expectations unreasonably high? Because they sound great to me too.
All I can think is that the final production is so detailed. Hearing a dry vocal can be off-putting.
Okay, here you go: Michael Jackson - The Way You Make Me Feel (Acapella) - YouTube
Michael Jackson, The Way You Make Me Feel, isolated vocals.
First of all, damn. So good; such talent. When it starts, the verse vocals are a single (sounding) track, focused on Michael’s dynamic, gospel-inspired phrasing. If MJ and Quincy overly treated those vocals, MJ’s complex style would get mushed up and lost in delay or something. So while the final version is much more treated with reverb, compression, etc, you don’t hear much difference because your ear focuses on a part of the vocal that doesn’t sound different.
Then you get to the chorus, where the vocal shifts dramatically to a locked-down sing-along main hook. No jitteriness, just a long smooth runway of vocal. The main track is still isolated, but then you hear the backing-vocal track, which is apparently bounced down to a single track from many, many others. Could that sound more like a piece of produced pop perfection?? Brilliant.
But for the purposes of this post, it couldn’t point out the contrast between dry and treated vocals more nicely.
Freddie’s vocals on BR aren’t nearly as treated as those backing vocals, but much more than the main MJ track or what we hear on Freddie’s iso vocals. So they do sound different. But not in a bad way at all.
My $.02
Would ‘Road to nowhere count’?
