Guide tracks - for singers to learn

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rob aylestone

rob aylestone

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I've mentioned I'm doing a pile of tracks for a theatre style tribute show. I've recorded the tracks from scratch, but the singer finds it useful to have original vocals so she can learn the song in the right style. I thought a few here might find this interesting - I've taken the original track - Gloria Estefan in this case, and used that as the tempo map for the track. This one is disco, a la 70s, so pretty static but a few 'strays' from a rigid BPM - then I used Spectral Layers to remove her voice. Then I did the track, and laid the original vocal on top of the new recording. No real need for a proper mix, because the track will become stems - so in this one, synths, percussion, bass and guitar mainly. The shows will always have live keys, bass and drums, but the guitar might be a person, as will percussion on some shows where budget permits, but on others as guitar is only on about half the tracks, we could do without guitar and the same with percussion - its a person on most songs, but we could do without.

Here are two clips, one with and one without the original real vocal - this would never be used, it's just for our singer to learn from. I rather like Disco!

 
I've been watching some videos on YouTube about the Bee Gees - and Saturday Night Fever era and how they changed from the poppy stuff to disco and it sort of exploded. Some of the songs are really clever with stuff going on you just don't notice till people tell you. When I was often playing for theatre stuff - in the pit, it was great to get shows with disco in them - the bass part for Disco Inferno is really fun to play - a bugger to sight read the first time - it's looks really hard but then it just sort of flows into the song. Great writing.
 
The Bee Gees were really good songwriters. I don't care for disco but I find myself amazed while listening to them.
 
rob aylestone said:
I've been watching some videos on YouTube about the Bee Gees - and Saturday Night Fever era and how they changed from the poppy stuff to disco and it sort of exploded. Some of the songs are really clever with stuff going on you just don't notice till people tell you. When I was often playing for theatre stuff - in the pit, it was great to get shows with disco in them - the bass part for Disco Inferno is really fun to play - a bugger to sight read the first time - it's looks really hard but then it just sort of flows into the song. Great writing.
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From what I understood, disco was a dying fad by the time SNF was made, causing it to re-explode.

spantini said:
The Bee Gees were really good songwriters. I don't care for disco but I find myself amazed while listening to them.
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Yeah, BGs and ABBA are by far my favorite Disco-era musicians.

Oh and Magic by Olivia Newton-John is one of my favorite songs ever.
 
Serendipity Records said:
From what I understood, disco was a dying fad by the time SNF was made, causing it to re-explode
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Not really. It hadn't been huge in the years '74-76 but it was very present and was middling along as a more song-oriented first cousin twice removed of funk and was finding its way into other styles and genres. I mean, Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Underfoot" and the Rolling Stones' "Hot Stuff" shows that disco in its first wave was permeating "unlikely" artists' consciousness and it was kind of thought of as back to danceable commercial Black music like the 60s, after all the revolution, social consciousness and inward-looking of the years leading up to George McCrae's "Rock me baby" in '74.
There was quite a lot of disco in the charts {"Rock the Boat", "Mama never told me", "Girls", "More, more, more", all that Hamilton Bohannon stuff and Disco Tex and his Sex-o-lettes etc}, the Bee Gees even had a disco hit in '75 with "Jive Talkin'."
In fact, the making of SNF and the double album soundtrack kind of demonstrates that disco was gradually gaining ground. In England, Punk stole the headlines in late '76/'77 but sales and popularity-wise, the difference between the two was like that of an impotent 99-year-old and an old-time ancient world harem stud.
Interestingly, both mutated into forms that well outlived them both.
But when SNF came out, that was when an already hotting-up form of music really went nuclear.
 
grimtraveller said:
Not really. It hadn't been huge in the years '74-76 but it was very present and was middling along as a more song-oriented first cousin twice removed of funk and was finding its way into other styles and genres. I mean, Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Underfoot" and the Rolling Stones' "Hot Stuff" shows that disco in its first wave was permeating "unlikely" artists' consciousness and it was kind of thought of as back to danceable commercial Black music like the 60s, after all the revolution, social consciousness and inward-looking of the years leading up to George McCrae's "Rock me baby" in '74.
There was quite a lot of disco in the charts {"Rock the Boat", "Mama never told me", "Girls", "More, more, more", all that Hamilton Bohannon stuff and Disco Tex and his Sex-o-lettes etc}, the Bee Gees even had a disco hit in '75 with "Jive Talkin'."
In fact, the making of SNF and the double album soundtrack kind of demonstrates that disco was gradually gaining ground. In England, Punk stole the headlines in late '76/'77 but sales and popularity-wise, the difference between the two was like that of an impotent 99-year-old and an old-time ancient world harem stud.
Interestingly, both mutated into forms that well outlived them both.
But when SNF came out, that was when an already hotting-up form of music really went nuclear.
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"Bill Oakes, who supervised the soundtrack, asserts that Saturday Night Fever did not begin the disco craze but rather prolonged it: "Disco had run its course. These days, Fever is credited with kicking off the whole disco thing—it really didn't. Truth is, it breathed new life into a genre that was actually dying."

- from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Gees
 
I never once said that Saturday Night Fever began the disco craze. If you read what I said, I clearly talk about George McCrae in 1974, "the years 74-76" and a number of songs, including the Bee Gees themselves.
I wholeheartedly and absolutely disagree with Bill Oakes when he says disco had run its course. I remember 1977 very well {I have reason to} and I remember what was being played in parties I went to. And I'll make the point again, what is SNF about ? It's about a guy who escapes his humdrum existence by going where at the weekends ? And doing what ? To what ?
It's a nuanced point when Oakes says that SNF prolonged disco. In a way, that's true. But it's as true as to say Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band prolonged psychedelia. Well, in a way, it did. But psychedelia had shown no signs of dying and going away when 'Pepper' came out. Likewise, disco wasn't on the way out when SNF arrived. Granted, it wasn't hitting the newspaper headlines the way Punk had, but to say it was dying is being wise after the event and, in my opinion, overly dramatic and mythological. The Bee Gees songs on the soundtrack were written for their own album and two others on the soundtrack {including the aforementioned "Jive Talkin'"} had already been released. Many of the songs on the soundtrack were already in the public domain and found their way onto the album not because disco was dying, but because they were songs that clubbers danced to.
What's interesting is the way the public loved the film and subsequently bought the album. It was a great way of having all those songs in one place for a fraction of the cost. What the film really did do was to bring the discotheque into the mainstream consciousness of, well, basically, White men all over the world, which then bled its way into many arenas that it previously hadn't been able to penetrate. And when the sales of the soundtrack went through the roof, tons of artists then jumped aboard because disco now meant hits. Kiss, Queen, you name it, loads of artists wanted a disco song. But artists had been slipping in disco songs for a good 3 years before SNF came out ~ and they hadn't been stopping, even with the advent of Punk.
 
spantini said:
The Bee Gees were really good songwriters. I don't care for disco but I find myself amazed while listening to them.
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Bump for the melodic bridge/break on Nights on Broadway. Whish it lasted a little longer actually :>)
 
mixsit said:
Bump for the melodic bridge/break on Nights on Broadway. Whish it lasted a little longer actually :>)
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They probably had to keep it trimmed down for radio, even then it's 4:30.

With a DAW you can make it as long as you like for your own playlist :listeningmusic:
 
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