Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Fake Live Stage Venues

This is topic Fake Live Stage Venues in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 03-19-2002, 04:53 PM:

I do not know how old this practice is, but recently there has been a lot of publicity about how high power stage acts like Brittany Spears only lip-sinc during their "concerts". Gee whiz, what a scam!

This past week PBS had a major fundraiser, which included many shows. One was a gathering of many of the reknown Rock and Roll pioneers and the other was a major Bluegrass concert. No high power stage theatrics, just excellent music from some of the most talanted musicians and pioneers...Another excellent group that played together was the Million Dollar Band that played together on the old TV show "Hee-Haw". Does anyone watch Austin City Limits?

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-19-2002, 10:11 PM:

Seems to me the Monkees got burned by the revelation that they lip-sync'd their concerts in the '60's. I'm sure the practice goes back much further than that.

Here in 'Vegas it's common practice to back-up the lead singers of production shows with tape or HD tracks. If a mic dies, pot up the track. Of course nowadays all of the non-lead music comes from tracks, live orchestras having died here in 1989.

Paul
Greetings from the land of the thrice kissed ass
Unemployed mercenary film/video projectionist/engineer
"When the money runs out, so does I."
-1

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-19-2002, 10:53 PM:

It is standard for live broadway productions to double mic the performers, giving them two seperate body mics and transmitters, in case one of them dies. What is also standard is to "sweeten" the numbers. The performers come in and record the numbers and this recording is played along with the number live on stage, unless it is a solo number. This is done for one simple reason. Have you ever heard 24 live mics on one confined stage before? If you haven't, feel yourselves lucky. With the sweet track you don't need to have ANY of the mics up during the nubmer. But you still hear the performers singing from the stage, and the sweet track is almost always recorded on the very stage that the performance is on, in order to keep the acoustics more true to form. Unlike britney and janet jackson, and the rest, that use thier studio enhanced tracks for the live show. Makes it sound so unreal. They need to re-record each number live at each stadium before each show, to keep it at least sort of real.

The first instance of musical acts using sweetened tracks on live shows that I can recall would have to be Jan and Dean, after that horrible car wreck. But it was soon accidentally revealed during a live show.

Wouldn't it be great if the computers shut down on a britney show leaving her with just her voice. To make sure that the truth is out, she does sing during her shows, a total of 10 percent level volume to a 90 percent sweet track. Hey, maybe her body will hold out.

Dave

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 03-19-2002, 10:55 PM:

Yes, they also lip-sync at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. At first I thought it was "cheating," but when you see the complexity of the place you begin to understand why somone would do it that way.

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 03-20-2002, 09:37 AM:

Heck, even our church choir lip-sync's during our Easter Pageant!! We have a 24 channel recorder in the choir studio and about two weeks before the pageant, the choir spends about two or three nights of a week in the choir studio and lays down the vocal tracks on DAT.

During the actuall shows, the choir sings on stage with NO mics, but the sound coming from the cluster overheard is glorious. No one in the audience knows (with the exception of us guys in the sound booth).

------------------
Barry Floyd
Floyd Entertainment Group
Nashville, Tennessee
(Drive-In Theatre - Start-Up)

Posted by Harry Robinson (Member # 265) on 03-20-2002, 09:48 AM:

At least as bad as pre-recording vocal tracks for live performances is the popular new practice of using Pro-Tools pitch correction in real time. Many of the newer pre-packaged pop and country acts are sold more on their cosmetic effect than on their ability (what's New?) so now they can dial them in vocally. The problem is you can hear the processing clicking their notes to pitch if the sensitivity is set too high. It won't be long til they all sound like the voice that tells you to, "move to the center of the tram" in the Atlanta airport.

Posted by Bob Maar (Member # 763) on 03-20-2002, 09:52 AM:

My .02 cents.

If I am paying to see a live show and the proformers are putting my money in their pocket...thay had best not be lip syncing. I don't go to see them, I go the hear them...the talent is in the voice not the looks.

Posted by Geoffrey Weiss (Member # 882) on 03-20-2002, 02:56 PM:

I'm with Bob on that one as far as live performance of professionals goes. But how do you guys feel about something like MIDI? Is it cheating for a performer to have a full orchestra MIDI-sequenced? Especially during community theatre or a church performance or something like that? I did "The Rocky Horror Show" live with a former student of mine and there was no way we would have been able to FIT a band into the black box theatre--even had we been able to find one. MIDI's not the ideal, but it got the job done. (BTW, we sang our own songs on that one.)

Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 03-20-2002, 03:17 PM:

>>Heck, even our church choir lip-sync's during our Easter Pageant!!<<

No, say it ain't so! Was it in "History of the World" where Moses drops the tablet with Commandments 11-15 on it? Thou Shalt Not Lip-Sync!

Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 03-20-2002, 04:51 PM:

In 1991-I think it was, while stationed at Norton AFB San Bernardino CA, Jan and Dean and the Turtles performed as part of the Route 66 Ralley/car show. Despite his injuries--I believe it was Jan that was injured--they really put on a class act, and he is very lucky to be able to physically function! After the concert, he stuck around to do some fund raising work for for head injury victims.

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-20-2002, 05:20 PM:

Lets not confuse lip synching with track sweetening. It is logistically impossible to run 24 give or take a dozen live mics at once on stage. best to have the performers sing to a pre recorded track of themselves singing on that same stage. Otherwise the feedback loops are so horrendous that all would be bleeding from the ears in seconds.

Lip synching, not even singing at all or not able to hear the actual singing goin on while performing, is just evil.

Dave

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-20-2002, 06:32 PM:

The Milli Vanilli fiasco has to be the all-time champ for lip-synch hood-winkery. These fellows did not sing any of the songs on their debut album, which netted the duo a Best New Artist Grammy Award. That award was later taken away after the ruse was discovered.

One of the things that gave away Milli Vanilli was a performance they did on MTV. During the song "Girl You Know It's True" the digital tape being used got caught in some endless loop where the main phrase of the chorus just repeated over and over and over again like a scratched record.

A follow up album where the two dreadlocked fellows actually sang tanked badly. A couple years ago one of those guys killed himself.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-20-2002, 09:23 PM:

Dave wrote:

quote:
It is logistically impossible to run 24 give or take a dozen live mics at once on stage. best to have the performers sing to a pre recorded track of themselves singing on that same stage. Otherwise the feedback loops are so horrendous that all would be bleeding from the ears in seconds.

Not impossible at all. Here, in the case of shows with live orchestras (rare now but still happens), we routinely run with that many mics or more open simultaneously on stage. Yes the feedback nodes can be difficult, but not impossible. Today's signal processing options make it even less impossible.

On Starlight Express (1994-1997) at the Las Vegas Hilton we had 30 singers (all on roller skates) wearing RF boom mics, with two handheld RF mics available as spares. The finale and bows had the entire cast on stage singing in unison. Two shows a night, six nights a week, with very few problems. On that show the producers decided there would be no backup tracks--if a mic quit, one of the handhelds would be run out to the perfomer. They even made a point of it by announcing at the top of the show that the entire show was performed live. Admittedly the "orchestra" was three guys playing sampling keyboards all MIDI'd and sequenced together, which resulted in some pretty funny sounds coming from the pit (actually a room backstage) during the occasional MIDI crash. But that's another topic. So in the end one could say that show had at least a partially canned band, but the 30 singers were all live.

Paul
My favorite Las Vegas soundman's t-shirt, printed by Steve Varner at Local 720:
"Everyone in the world knows two things:"
"1. Their name"
"2. Sound"
-0

Posted by Tom Sauter (Member # 616) on 03-21-2002, 10:49 AM:

quote:

"It is logistically impossible to run 24 give or take a dozen live
mics at once on stage."

Whoa... thats not too many mics. I have done shows with 67 live mics on stage (Beatlemania, 1998 -- symphony orchestra + the band) and 8 monitor mixes. It is difficult to control feedback, but certainly not impossible. A good FOH engineer will use the PA to REINFORCE the musicians, in much the same way that sweet tracks can be used to back up lead vocals. It may also be necessary to provide AMPLIFICATION if you're in a 15,000 seat arena, in which case nothing changes. You just have to be a little less subtle

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 03-21-2002, 05:43 PM:

How about the Super Bowl? That's where Whitney Houston did "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1991 -- during George H.W. Bush's war, Desert Storm.

To cash in on US jingoism Arista Records rush-released her Super Bowl performance as a cassette single. A few weeks later the New York Post reported that Ms. Houston never sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. Why not? She lip-synched! Arista was forced to withdraw that record from record stores. Her career would have crashed had it not been for The Bodyguard.

FWIW Arista was also the US label for Milli Vanilli -- whose own lip-synching scam was exposed a few months earlier.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-21-2002, 06:31 PM:

Well just like most theatres have forgotten that reel projectionists are showmen so have live theatres. In fact multiplex mentality rules in most of them
When Garth Drabinstky left cineplex for Livent most of that mentality went with him
A few years ago I was in newyork and took in a musical at the St James and becaus e I got my tickets at the timesquare discount it was the second row and through out the whole show I was shocked by the distraction of the pit orchestra throwing paper airplanes at each other and talking loud enough to be heard in the second row
It is also lamentable that actors feel that the "orson wells/marlon brando" school of acting of mumbling lines and requiring mics to be heard in the house is required. It seems like showmanship and vocal training are becoming a lost art

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-23-2002, 04:37 AM:

I will accept my foibled post as inaccurate in a sense...

I do accept that it is possible to do a cagillion mics with no feedback.

from my own experience i have ran 22 mics to a drum set plus an addition 12 mics for various items. All perfectly.

I brain farted when I wrote the post and missed a few points. My key point to say that sometimes in many different types of shows, mostly broadway and choral in origin, have to use sweetened tracks to avoid using all the mics. The mics in question are the body mics that use a omnidirection pickup pattern, allowing for creative placement of microphones to allow for costuming to conceal it. These mics can have the sensitivity turned down to a certain extent to avoid the problem, but depending on the acoustics and the relevence of blocking with the stage size, you can end up in pure sound engineering hell, or in heaven, it all depends on what you have to work with.

My only point was to point out the sometimes necessity of sweet tracks in the case of hellish acoustics.

Dave