Can you ID this mic?

[rob aylestone]

She is a nicer sounding singer to me but that is irrelevant. I’m qualified to assess dance yet I cannot dance a step as I have poor coordination. I am not a great pianist but I am competent to judge them. She is like many untrained people. Singing by common sense and either has no singing teacher or one that is also self taught. All the performance arts have standards set. My stage manager is a graduate of RADA and knows how to do it properly. Her cover knows how to get to the end of the show. The girl in question has a nice, but untrained voice that is without doubt not as good as it could be with the aid of a proper singing teacher. The snag is what we are hearing is treated and honed.

Re the cathedral reverb? If you cannot with your eyes closed, tell if you are in a cathedral, large baroque church or a smaller stone chapel or a car park, that is worrying. Car park reverb is very different. People spend fortunes in time and money on reverb generation to match real world spaces, and NOT create the wrong one.

The problem nowadays is that capturing sound live is often so hard, it is easier to just record in the studio, enhancing and treating - then mime. The great unwashed public soak it up as real, and it isn't.

EDIT
Just catching up - that holy forever one above. Now that one sounds real. The reasons stack up. They're sitting, so their diaphragms are squished - that's a characteristic sound. They are not perfectly in tune, because you cannot autotune ensembles. Best of all, the boxy sound of a room with parallel surfaces. Essentially they're doing barbershop - singing off each other, changing tuning, adapting. Very different from the similar but totally different sounding other videos where they've tweaked. That video sort of validates the comments on the others. I suspect that one is what they really sound like. No polish. Real. Revealing.

 

[brassplyer]

I just have an aversion to 'bland crap'.
Do you really want to waste your life listening to Marie Osmond's soppy garbage?

Aaaand you really believed it was important to anyone on Earth that you make this declaration.

How about that.

 

[brassplyer]

She is a nicer sounding singer to me but that is irrelevant. I’m qualified to assess dance yet I cannot dance a step as I have poor coordination. I am not a great pianist but I am competent to judge them. She is like many untrained people. Singing by common sense and either has no singing teacher or one that is also self taught. All the performance arts have standards set. My stage manager is a graduate of RADA and knows how to do it properly. Her cover knows how to get to the end of the show. The girl in question has a nice, but untrained voice that is without doubt not as good as it could be with the aid of a proper singing teacher. The snag is what we are hearing is treated and honed.

Re the cathedral reverb? If you cannot with your eyes closed, tell if you are in a cathedral, large baroque church or a smaller stone chapel or a car park, that is worrying. Car park reverb is very different. People spend fortunes in time and money on reverb generation to match real world spaces, and NOT create the wrong one.

I'm using the term "cathedral reverb" as a general type - the kind of natural reverb found in a cavernous environment with hard surfaces that it sounded like you didn't think is a genuine phenomenon in parking garages which anyone who's paid even casual attention knows it is.

You couldn't hear eyes open or closed that the accompaniment music in their parking garage video is some source off-camera that yes, is generating the same reverb their voices are generating. No doubt they experimented with camera distance to get the optimal location to get a nice balance. They didn't need to consult with some YouTube vlogger.

"My stage manager is a graduate of RADA"

That's nice - where can I hear your stage manager sing?

Here's The Voices of Liberty at Epcot. They do live performances like this all day. They're doing this without the benefit of monitors or headphones.

 

[brassplyer]

 

[brassplyer]

Here's The Voices of Liberty at Epcot. They do live performances like this all day. They're doing this without the benefit of monitors or headphones.

If they were in a studio environment with a backing track or even performing with a band or backing track they'd be that much more locked onto the center of pitch.

 

[rob aylestone]

Of course they do and they are also very good singers who have good ears. However if they had to sing to a track they would need speakers or IEMs and speakers colour the sound. I cannot help it if you don’t understand. I’m not going to attempt to convince you as we both differ so much. The comment about the stage manager was to point out that detailed in depth training produces better results. Control and solid musical skills. Gifted amateurs can often have decent careers but usually they have limits to their development. Car parks do not sound like cathedrals. All I hear are close miked voices not natural ones. Must have also taken forever to find three minutes of absolute silence without city noises?

 

[Slouching Raymond]

I vote for Gabriella Hope.
A most genuine squeeky voice.

 

[brassplyer]

Of course they do and they are also very good singers who have good ears. However if they had to sing to a track they would need speakers or IEMs and speakers colour the sound. I cannot help it if you don’t understand. I’m not going to attempt to convince you as we both differ so much. The comment about the stage manager was to point out that detailed in depth training produces better results. Control and solid musical skills. Gifted amateurs can often have decent careers but usually they have limits to their development. Car parks do not sound like cathedrals. All I hear are close miked voices not natural ones. Must have also taken forever to find three minutes of absolute silence without city noises?

???

I've asked you before how your hearing checks out - in both of their garage videos I've seen "Rewrite The Stars" and "The Night We Met" there's ambient city noise clearly evident. If you seriously can't hear it your hearing needs looking at.

 

[brassplyer]

"All I hear are close miked voices"

Again....???

*This* is what close-mic'd sounds like.




Or more aptly - the original video at the start of the thread.

 

[rob aylestone]

OK - now we are into the insults, because I do not hear what you do, that is it for me. You are totally closed minded.
The city noises sound like the old backgrounds we played in from CDs for video and film. REAL intrusive noises that would wreck a distant mic recording. Where are the horns so loud they blot out words, where are the ambulances and police vehicles. My hearing is fine, thank you! So good I am hearing fake, where you hear what you want to hear. So far - listening to their output, it is processed, tweaked and sounds fake - when you are used to hearing fake, as I am.

I'm not going to comment more. Clearly - you are not open to sensible discussion.

 

[brassplyer]

OK - now we are into the insults, because I do not hear what you do, that is it for me. You are totally closed minded.
The city noises sound like the old backgrounds we played in from CDs for video and film. REAL intrusive noises that would wreck a distant mic recording. Where are the horns so loud they blot out words, where are the ambulances and police vehicles. My hearing is fine, thank you! So good I am hearing fake, where you hear what you want to hear. So far - listening to their output, it is processed, tweaked and sounds fake - when you are used to hearing fake, as I am.

I'm not going to comment more. Clearly - you are not open to sensible discussion.

@rob aylestone - not insults I was asking a serious question based on your unambiguous statement -

"three minutes of absolute silence without city noises"

How else could one reasonably interpret that other than you can't hear the very obvious noise floor in both of those videos?

Further you don't have the vaguest idea where the garage or garages are, what the expected level of noise is likely to be. In the one video passing traffic can be seen maybe a 1/2 mile or so in the background. Presumably it's somewhere in the Tempe/Mesa Arizona area - not everywhere is downtown New York or London, the presence of vehicular traffic isn't synonymous with constant car horns or emergency vehicle sirens. I could take video of interstates around here where you'd rarely hear a horn. They're college students, it's possible it's on a college campus. In both cases there are no cars around them so it doesn't suggest it's a busy time.

Now you're envisioning they went to a parking garage, went through the exercise of dubbing in ambient noise - are you saying you now *can* hear it where you heard silence before? - all for the purpose of fooling the audience into thinking they're singing in a parking garage. You swear you hear close-mic'd voices.

I just listened to "The Night We Met" on their Spotify page - while similar which I'd expect since it's the same arrangement sung by the same trio the balance of the voices doesn't sound the same. A major tell is in the first phrase of "Oohs" - the prominence of the two lower voices, the C#/Db on the third note in the garage version that I'm not hearing on the studio track. On the first note of the second phrase it sounds to me like the intonation isn't as tight by a few cents on the studio version as it is in the garage version.

I say it's not the same performance.