Isolated Vocals Means Hearing A Song You’ve Heard Hundreds Of Times In A New Way
Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend The Who photo; London Features, Neal Preston
With these versions where all the other instruments have been eliminated but the vocals, you can hear the singer’s voice as an instrument itself. These songs range from 1969 – 1980, all before the invention of pitch correction (aka auto-tune) which many music purists believe ruined music forever. These songs are from an era when singers actually had to be able to sing.
Of course bands sound great in the studio where a variety of techniques are used to make bands and vocalists be their best. Many of these songs use compression, multi-layered vocals with almost everyone using some amount of reverb (echo).
These versions display the studio magic that vocalists employ and the gift that is given to some singers who need practically no help, i.e. Stevie Wonder and Paul Rodgers
It is great being able to listen to the lyrics clean and in most cases clearly hearing the words. Many music fans are lyrically challenged without a lyrics sheet in front of them. When listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” there are listeners who have long thought they heard “there’s a bathroom on the right” instead of “a bad moon on the rise.”
For these videos there are long periods of silence where music would normally be. I’ve edited the starting point for each video so the lyrics kick in immediately and you are not listening to up to a minute of silence.
We’ll let the songs speak for themselves.
We will be doing two more features on vocals over the next month. One on hard rock /heavy metal and another on The Beatles.
In the meantime, here are a dozen iconic rock songs with the vocals only.
