Lip sync? Auto tune? Double track?

[EMom]

DD11 just had to see Selena Gomez, so we hauled her to the Houston Rodeo this weekend. Last year, we took her to see the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato. I have to give the JB and DL credit for last year.....They actually sang. They occasionally hit off notes, were sometimes "pitchy" and Demi was almost hoarse on a few songs. They weren't bad at all, but as is typical of live performances vs. recorded ones, you got some bumps along the way. But again, they were doing the singing.

So this year, Selena Gomez comes out and starts singing and it seems she never hit a less than perfect note. The band was WAY louder than her vocals and sometimes you could barely hear her, but when you did, it was pitch perfect, a note was never cut off due to shortness of breath, etc. So DH and I start wondering, was it lip syncing, auto tuning, a second track over her actual singing or what? Because she just could not be that good.

And then it happened. She announced it was her dad's birthday, called him on stage and asked the crowd to accompany her in singing Happy Birthday to him. Alrighty. But she was the only one with a microphone. Ouch! I had no idea you could hit that many bad notes in Happy Birthday. Seriously, DH and I gave each other this look. DD was clueless as she still believes they all sing in those auto tune voices in real life. It wouldn't have been so shockingly noticeable (like a splash of ice cold water in the face) had every note of every song prior to that not been utter perfection. It was the like the vocal before & after version of a makeover.

Someone should have auto tuned Happy Birthday too...... I guess she didn't think that far ahead, but the devil's in the details. Oh well, DD was happy.

 

[tlbwriter]

Now that's funny!

 

[EMom]

There was one thing that made the night CREEPY. For most of the night, her name was flashed on the screen/stage as "SELENA GOMEZ." But near the end of the show, it was shown as "SELENA SELENA SELENA" a couple of times. If that had happened anywhere but the Houston Rodeo, it might not have been as creepy. But since she was named after Selena, (who went by just the single name, Selena) and the Houston Rodeo was one of Selena's last appearances before she was murdered and there were probably a decent number of people (now the parents) in the crowd who had also been at the original Selena's Houston Rodeo concert shortly before her murder.....Well, there was an element of bad taste to it.

It just seemed as if someone would have said, "You know, maybe we ought to keep 'Gomez' in there while we're in Texas because when you only use 'Selena' people's minds go straight to dead, murdered Selena whom you were named after and that's just not good." I don't blame Selena Gomez since I think she's far too young to have looked at it this way or seen it from that angle. But I'm not the only adult who cringed when SELENA SELENA SELENA flashed on the screen. With all the adults involved along the way, I'd have thought someone would have spoken up.

 

[RockAndRollBallerina]

Its very possible to keep an auto tuner running for an entire show. Many rock artists who have completely fried their vocal chords use them. I know Ozzy Osbourne does, David Coverdale of Whitesnake does.

It's also very possible that an EQued backing track was being run through the PA system in addition to Selenas Auto Tuned vocals.

And if the band was louder than what Selena was then thats a mistake of the sound engineer for not pulling the band under in the mix volume wise, and putting her vocals up in the mix.

My fiance is a professional touring sound engineer with more than 20 years of experience, so he's told me all the tricks in the live audio book.

 

[tlbwriter]

It just seemed as if someone would have said, "You know, maybe we ought to keep 'Gomez' in there while we're in Texas because when you only use 'Selena' people's minds go straight to dead, murdered Selena whom you were named after and that's just not good." I don't blame Selena Gomez since I think she's far too young to have looked at it this way or seen it from that angle. But I'm not the only adult who cringed when SELENA SELENA SELENA flashed on the screen. With all the adults involved along the way, I'd have thought someone would have spoken up.

I'm not from Texas and never listened to Selena and even I would have said "Hey, this ain't right."

 

[EMom]

I'm not from Texas and never listened to Selena and even I would have said "Hey, this ain't right."

I wasn't a fan of the original Selena, but I knew who she was. We were on vacation in Germany when she was murdered and it made the papers/tabloids there. Of course, all the headlines, etc. were in German and my German is somewhat limited. But I knew enough to figure out who had been murdered. When DH asked what it was about, I said something like, "It's that singer Selena and I'm pretty sure it says she didn't just die....She was murdered." When we got home, we read the full, awful story. A lot of Texans knew who she was even if they never listened to her music because she drew in huge crowds (60,000+) at the rodeo concerts. I really have no idea if people outside Texas knew much about her before she was murdered. Maybe, maybe not.

Most people don't realize how BIG the rodeo concerts are in Houston. I remember last year Ryan Seacrest annoyed me when he essentially made fun of the Jonas Brothers singing a "new" song at the rodeo before they performed it on AI, as if a puny rodeo performance counted for nothing. They sold over 72,000 tickets to that concert.....It wasn't as if they played at some honky tonk with a crowd of 45.

Anyway, on a lighter note, the fact that someone didn't think ahead and auto tune Selena Gomez's Happy Birthday, Dear Daddy is still a puzzler to me. ACK! It was bad.