I get that, to an extent anyway. But for a professional singer to sing completely off-key? (Granted I haven’t heard the performance in question, nor am I itchin’ to.) One would presume that on the way to the large arena and lots of hit records phase of their careers, they had some experience performing in at least a few slightly less epic venues.
And you’re right, I don’t perform on stage unless I’m riffing on the ‘check one two’ thing. But I do very much get how room conditions can affect a mix: in smaller venues the number of large waterbags in front of the stage will often change by an order of magnitude at extremely random intervals, suddenly revealing the [formerly] polished concrete floor lurking just beneath my mix. (Oh, sorry, I meant to say that patrons tend to wander in and out, altering the acoustic properties of the room in horrifying ways.)
Sorry, but I stand by my initial thesis, and I feel that @Mindysan33’s Argument From Authority supports this conclusion.
It’s really, really hard to stay on pitch if the acoustics are so bad that you can’t hear yourself, or can hear only a horribly distorted version of yourself. (Or you get launched off pitch by hearing a horribly distorted version of your accompanist, and so on.) I’ve heard that happen in performance to people who’ve sung with the Metropolitan Opera and have flawless vocal technique.
And @chgoliz, this is just what I heard, that the stage is bad from a sound tech perspectives for live music… That could be incorrect, of course, but just what I’ve heard said.
Came to say this. There are professionals who attend a local karaoke spot where the speakers are in front of the singers, and the sound coming from the prompter is often too low to be heard over folks at the bar. We’ve had some cringe-worthy pitch problems because of it. You have to be able to hear yourself and the music - especially when a lot of popular karaoke song versions are not recorded in the same key that you hear in the commercial version of the tunes.
I meant to add, too, that I’ve been on the SNL stage (I used to work for NBC broadcast operations, about 15-20 years ago, but it’s not too different now) and it’s terrible for hearing anything.
There’s soundproofing material everywhere so that the mikes can hear only what they’re supposed to, but that means that anything you hear acoustically is horribly muffled. Performers wear headsets, but with all the digital processing, it at least used to be that the performers were hearing themselves in the headset about 60-100 ms delayed, which is HORRIBLE unless you’re a pipe organist (they’re used to it, pipe organs are slow.) And then there’s a great chorus effect coming from the audience’s monitor speakers. What you hear on stage is for
And no, I never got anywhere near the talent. I was there to work with the technical director. I think in those days I knew every TD at 30 Rock.
We literally got a lecture last night from our choral director about it, because we switch between three main concert venues for our performances, and unfortunately this time the works we are performing are much better suited to the fall performance space instead of our winter performance space. Personally, this is my favorite of the three spaces from the point of view of acoustics, but it’s true that we’re going to have to be extra mindful of how we produce our sound in order to project the effect we want.
This is exactly what I’m saying though–it’s BAFFLING as to why there are (or were, I’ve not heard anyone really badly off key on SNL in a while) several artists who had issues or have a good sound mix. The Coldplay example just stood out to me because it was the lead singer who was clearly off and not some other performance issue.
It was too much “a performance” in mine, but It’s also SNL. Hope I’m not treading on you with this, but what bothers me is all of the fakery around Byrne. Watch the “drummers” on the right. Completely faking hitting anything. I’d rather he got up and did a performance where it didn’t have to be that dumbed down,
David is smart enough he could have done that, but he also is really big on image and choreographed moves.
Fair enough, but again, they are reproducing a performance from a stage play, so there are very different ideas about performance and authenticity vs. Byrne’s punk/underground roots, I’d argue.
that’s true, but I think his entire career has really been about exploring artifice in American culture, and this is yet another dimension of that career long exploration.
A friend of mine was furious when he heard that Byrne did Once in a Lifetime on SNL. He is still salty that Talking Heads broke up without doing a proper farewell tour, and as such, he doesn’t think that Byrne should be allowed to use any of the old songs anymore.
Yeah, I think he’s often projected a sort of faux-innocent, alien’s outlook on the way the norms do things, like in that movie he did with John Goodman.
