In this Youtube clip recorded October 14th 2007, you can watch and listen as Van Halen comes onstage to do their big encore, “Jump.” Only problem is, they keyboard part is pre-recorded. At 44.1 KHz sampling rate. Whatever equipment the sound guy used to play it through the PA system, it played it back at 48 KHz. This puts the pitch and speed up not quite a semitone. But they had to play it anyway. Ouch!
Zowie. That Hertz.
That was quite literally painful to hear.
I’m not sure it’s the keyboard part that’s off, it sounds like Eddie’s guitar is badly out of tune (and a number of the comments say the same thing). In either case, OUCH!
Yes, a number of the comments say Ed’s out of tune, but then so would the bassist have to be by the same amount. I did a test of it at work with the CD, and sped it up to 48 KHz and the pitches of the keyboard on the CD and in the video match.
Eddie should have used the Townshend solution: trash the backing-tape equipment, and haul the sound man out on stage by his ear. Always gets a good crowd reaction!
Just so you know, it’s probably not the sound guy’s fault for any of this. In my experience, pre-recorded synths and loops are usually started by the keyboard player on stage so that it starts on time. All the sound guy does is make sure the channel is unmuted, turned up, eq’d, and routed correctly.
From what I understand, he was handed the wrong guitar by his guitar tech. The guitar was tuned differently, and might not have even had the same intervals set between the strings, which would make it hard to compensate on the fly.
Mines Mystique
Mines, there are four guys in that group. None of them were playing a keyboard. And there’s the part I wrote above about how the keyboard pitches match when you speed the CD up to 48K that sort of negates your whole reasoning.
Makes you wonder how often Rush screws up due to technology. Half of their show is pre-recorded stuff that has to be triggered correctly.
Not half as badly as Kraftwerk would be screwed in the same situation.
I remember watching Kraftwerk play an abbreviated version of “Autobahn” on Midnight Special back in 1974. Live. By the time they got to the end, all the oscillators were out of tune with each other on all the different keyboards. The last chord was excruciating!
Now they play laptops.
The pre-recorded keyboard part is off. I can tell it’s in the wrong key — listen to this.
Just to challenge the “it’s just Eddies guitar cause everyone else is in tune” argument…
David Lee Roth is a singer - he pitches his voice to the instruments he hears - which will be the keys. It may be a strain on the high notes but he still hits them.
The drummer won’t sound out of tune, but will be playing a bit faster
The Bass player - this is the difficult one. If he is playing a fretted bass, he is in the same position as Eddie - stuck trying to match a 1.5 semitone difference. But - he could be playing a fretless bass, so he just needs to move his hands a bit and he is back in tune. Also, a four (or five) -string bass is pretty easy to retune (no locking tremolo systems to deal with) on the fly - I’ve done it myself, and the keyboard track has a strong bass line to hide the retuning, particularly during the long intro.
But I would have thrown a fit on stage, cut the song and restarted it - Eddie has lost the rock and roll edge :rolleyes:
Si
Ow, ow, ow, OW.
Who opened for Van Halen, Milli Vanilli?
What was with the guy waving the red flag and all the sparkly stuff? This is rock ‘n’ roll?
That just sucks.
I didn’t actually think it was possible to make that song worse. Guess I need to be more pessimistic.
I guess they might as well… QUIT!
Don’t say that! I just got my tickets for the 12/22 show, and I’m crossing my fingers that the band won’t split up by then!