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Author Topic: Mike Love Planning New Vocal Album  (Read 5841 times)
NateRuvin
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« Reply #25 on: May 28, 2020, 10:59:06 PM »

Sorry for the late reply, didn't expect my comment to stir such a reaction.

As someone who spends many hours each day pitch correcting vocals, I can confidently say that NPP is filled to the brim with autotune.

You'd have an easier time finding a vocal part that hasn't been processed.

This Beautiful Day and The Right Time are the songs that came to mind when I was typing my first response, and in revisiting those tracks now, I feel the same. at 52 seconds in The Right Time, when Al sings "So many times we been fooled again" his voice has an unnatural stability, and lack of vibrato- that's a digital artifact of autotune.

It might not be the T Pain esque sound from UTL, but it's there. Al is a tremendous, tremendous singer, but even he can't hit notes with so much precision, with no vibrato. The lead lines on The Right Time are very  locked in, the voices don't have that natural trail.

And just because I'd be willing to bet nearly anything that these tracks are pitch corrected, doesn't mean I don't enjoy them. I enjoy the C50 CD as well. I can dislike the autotune, but enjoy other things about the performances.


And I wasn't meaning to say Mike's solo albums are on par with stuff like TLOS, I said *Most of recent solo efforts* ... So I was thinking more Disney, NPP, ....

I understand why the autotune is a turnoff, but I'm genuinely shocked most BBs fans don't dig UTL as much as I do... I think Crescent Moon, Ram Raj, All The Love In Paris, and Too Cruel are phenomenal.

Also, are we really going to read so much into me writing Love-Wilson, vs Wilson-Love? I was typing quickly, and didn't know people read  anything into that.... In fact, I used to have a songwriting parntership, where my co-writer went nuts if his name didn't go first, I thought he was the only one read who read so much into that stuff... I don't think it makes a very big difference whether you say I Want To Hold Your Hand was written by Lennon-McCartney or McCartney-Lennon... Same as Fun, Fun, Fun or WOTS being Wilson-Love or Love-Wilson... Co-writing is co-writing. I didn't know it made you Mike-centric so put his name first. I don't think I'm Bacharach-centric, for saying Bacharach-David.


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Peadar 'Big Dinner' O'Driscoll
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« Reply #26 on: May 29, 2020, 02:21:54 AM »

Mike: Hey Scott, get the guys together and knock out 11 or 12 acapella songs.
Scott: Will do Mike, any thoughts on the track listing?
Mike: yeah, old doo wop stuff, something george harrison related, hit the americas band thing and of course some good ol fun fun fun.
Scott: OK
Mike: When's it's done, I'll add my vocals but not spending more than a few hours on it.

Just joking...no offence to Scott or anyone else  Grin

The guy is nearly 80. Don't blame him for taking it easy.
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Pretty Funky
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« Reply #27 on: May 29, 2020, 03:22:06 AM »

Mike: Hey Scott, get the guys together and knock out 11 or 12 acapella songs.
Scott: Will do Mike, any thoughts on the track listing?
Mike: yeah, old doo wop stuff, something george harrison related, hit the americas band thing and of course some good ol fun fun fun.
Scott: OK
Mike: When's it's done, I'll add my vocals but not spending more than a few hours on it.


Oh...and we need a video. Book a room and tell Stamos to bring his sheet.
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rab2591
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« Reply #28 on: May 29, 2020, 05:48:53 AM »

And I wasn't meaning to say Mike's solo albums are on par with stuff like TLOS, I said *Most of recent solo efforts* ... So I was thinking more Disney, NPP, ....

I understand why the autotune is a turnoff, but I'm genuinely shocked most BBs fans don't dig UTL as much as I do... I think Crescent Moon, Ram Raj, All The Love In Paris, and Too Cruel are phenomenal.

Well the autotune is so glaringly distracting that it is hard to pay attention to any other merits that UTL may have to offer. I was playing some of UTL on the stereo system last night and my wife asked without hesitation if the lead singer was supposed to sound like that, "it doesn't even sound human". Whereas I have played NPP, Disney, and Gershwin many times around her and it's been nothing but enjoyment. Both Disney and NPP are lightyears ahead of UTL in production - which, even if one isn't thrilled about Disney songs or the songwriting on NPP (even if there is pitch correction on it), you can at least listen through both albums without questioning the species of the lead singer.

What pisses me off about UTL is that with the liberal use of autotune (to put it mildly) it's as if Mike didn't even try to make a decent sounding album. Instead of taking his time in the vocal booth he opted for a computer to do the hard work (unfortunately I don't think a 1000 exaflop supercomputer could fix these problems). So if it's not worth his time properly recording it, why would it be worth my time listening to it? Think of all the hard work that went into recording the instrumentals, the mixing of those instrumentals, only to have a computer haphazardly pitch (in)correct every lead vocal.

Again, I think Ram Raj is awesome, but why put the racial joke in there? Daybreak Over The Ocean is one of my favorite songs from TWGMTR, but the UTL version is slathered in autotune, making it completely inferior to the TWGMTR version. There is good content on here ruined by problems that never had to exist in the first place. It's like being served a grade-A T-bone steak only to have the chef douse the plate in 10 year old expired ketchup. It's the same with the C50 Live album - it's amazing content ruined by this awful obsession with autotune.

Makes me think about Jonny Cash's American Series recordings - if I recall correctly, it is just Johnny's voice with no manipulation. He's goes off key here and there, but it's real...which is what makes it so powerful. Even if there is pitch correction on NPP, it is done sparingly enough that people can pinpoint the moments of vocal discrepancies, whereas on UTL you can point to whole songs as evidence of autotune.

NPP has a song that was featured in a major motion picture, amazing collaborations with popular artists from across the music spectrum, Blondie Chaplin, Al Jardine. To me it's just lightyears ahead of UTL in every way. Just my opinion.
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« Reply #29 on: May 29, 2020, 11:21:40 AM »


First off, where is this horrendous autotune people are talking about on No Pier Pressure? I don't really hear it. Maybe I'm deaf.

You're not deaf at all. The most simple explanation is you're not hearing that horrendous autotune all over NPP perhaps because it's not there. And for 5 years as people have been saying it's so horrendous on that album, no one when asked can give a specific example for us all to hear where the autotune is horrendous on NPP. I even offered a bottle of wine for anyone who would, and no one took me up on the offer. So I eventually drank the wine. There was one guy who insisted it was so bad the album was unlistenable, and when asked for an example, he came back with literally a millisecond of some audio tick on a Blondie Chaplin vocal, so he didn't get the wine obviously, he was a joker.

An example is what I was hoping Nate would provide after he mentioned the autotune on NPP so we could all hear a specific example someone else says they heard. Maybe he'll reply with some.

It's 100% there, just done well in most parts. I suspect it's melodyne rather than autotune, as well. If it's used by someone capable it can be very I'm not in the mood to listen to NPP right now, but I'll find some examples. I wish they wouldn't use it, but most musicians do now. It can be done well.
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Lonely Summer
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« Reply #30 on: May 29, 2020, 07:21:50 PM »

Sorry for the late reply, didn't expect my comment to stir such a reaction.

As someone who spends many hours each day pitch correcting vocals, I can confidently say that NPP is filled to the brim with autotune.

You'd have an easier time finding a vocal part that hasn't been processed.

This Beautiful Day and The Right Time are the songs that came to mind when I was typing my first response, and in revisiting those tracks now, I feel the same. at 52 seconds in The Right Time, when Al sings "So many times we been fooled again" his voice has an unnatural stability, and lack of vibrato- that's a digital artifact of autotune.

It might not be the T Pain esque sound from UTL, but it's there. Al is a tremendous, tremendous singer, but even he can't hit notes with so much precision, with no vibrato. The lead lines on The Right Time are very  locked in, the voices don't have that natural trail.

And just because I'd be willing to bet nearly anything that these tracks are pitch corrected, doesn't mean I don't enjoy them. I enjoy the C50 CD as well. I can dislike the autotune, but enjoy other things about the performances.


And I wasn't meaning to say Mike's solo albums are on par with stuff like TLOS, I said *Most of recent solo efforts* ... So I was thinking more Disney, NPP, ....

I understand why the autotune is a turnoff, but I'm genuinely shocked most BBs fans don't dig UTL as much as I do... I think Crescent Moon, Ram Raj, All The Love In Paris, and Too Cruel are phenomenal.

Also, are we really going to read so much into me writing Love-Wilson, vs Wilson-Love? I was typing quickly, and didn't know people read  anything into that.... In fact, I used to have a songwriting parntership, where my co-writer went nuts if his name didn't go first, I thought he was the only one read who read so much into that stuff... I don't think it makes a very big difference whether you say I Want To Hold Your Hand was written by Lennon-McCartney or McCartney-Lennon... Same as Fun, Fun, Fun or WOTS being Wilson-Love or Love-Wilson... Co-writing is co-writing. I didn't know it made you Mike-centric so put his name first. I don't think I'm Bacharach-centric, for saying Bacharach-David.



Nice post. The autotuned doesn't bother me that much. I might want to use it on my own voice in another 20 years.
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« Reply #31 on: May 30, 2020, 09:50:59 AM »

Thank you Nate and thatjacob for your replies and comments on the autotune/NPP issue! I too had worked with autotune mixing and editing vocals mostly using an Antares rackmount processor version of Autotune back in the day. I still have that Antares unit, and although I don't use it as much as when I was more active doing that kind of thing, I thought it was an amazing tool. As Jacob says, if you use it the right way, it can be transparent if not unnoticeable to most ears...and, if it's an existing vocal, if the care was taken when the vocal was tracked to stay mostly on pitch, it can be a fantastic tool to "clean up" around the edges and have it sit much better in the mix. It's something I'd use every time cutting stacked vocal harmonies if you want a really precise sound, or if you have a singer who runs out of breath at the end of a phrase and trails off at the end on their pitch.

So I think if NPP has anything it's the subtlety where it really, really is not noticeable to most ears - like my own and Jim V's above. In comparison, especially on the Beach Boys remakes he did, Mike's album(s) have an overt use of it to where it does sound like the deliberate overuse of the tool like T-Pain, Kanye, etc. In that case it was either an aesthetic or commercial choice to make Mike sound that unnatural, or his vocals were that far off of the pitches that the tool worked harder to bring it back into key...and *that* is what most listeners hear as the autotune effect. The way Kanye and T-Pain and all the others in the rap/R&B world who made it a trademark got it to sound that robotic on purpose was to sing deliberately out of key so the processor would overwork itself to bring the pitches back, and that's what creates the metallic, digital sheen that became the definition of what most know as autotune when they hear it. It's like compression: A compressor was not designed to "pump", it was supposed to be a transparent tool that leveled off the peaks and lows. But when engineers began to deliberately overload and overwork the compressors, and get that pumping sound along with other "effects" as a result, that overuse of it also became a signature sound as popular as what the device was originally designed to do transparently.

So when NPP came out, and you had a bunch of yahoos (sorry...) going around the web yelling "Autotune!" like it was a Kanye track, it was absurd and ridiculous. Because you simply do not hear anything like that on the album, surely not enough for some to be repeating how unlistenable it is due to the effect, or as Jim described it, the "horrendous" autoune. It simply isn't there. On some of Mike's tracks, however, it is obviously there with a lot of digital residue and overt use of the tool, and when it's a remake of a classic like Help me Rhonda specifically, it is very distracting. And I repeat, this is not a Mike vs. Brian trip...it's simply comparing what that overuse of the autotune (or whatever program) sounds like on Mike's voice versus what people were saying the NPP album sounded like when it's nowhere near that level of application. I just have to question again how and why the decision to do that to Mike's vocals was made, because it really does sound robotic and totally unnatural.

My issue then and even now was that there seemed to be almost a group effort to discredit and dismiss NPP based on elements that were not at play. If the NPP vocals had sounded like a Kanye track, I'd be right there complaining and probably throwing my copy into the ocean too. But listening in 2015 and listening again in 2020, I simply do not hear anything close to what some were suggesting was an overuse of autotune on the record. I guess it also got amped up a bit when a certain "review" of NPP turned into a Mike Love interview where he too made a crack about autotune...than he proceeds to release albums where autotune/pitch correction isn't just "slathered on" to use Nate's term, but was rather dipped and soaked for days in a 55-gallon drum of autotune to where some vocals don't even sound human.

Thanks again for the replies.
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