Discovered a little "oops!" gem in old Engelbert Humperdinck recording
- Thread starter Polkasound
- Start date
PaulieDC
Too much gear, not enough composing. Oy vey.
OK, that's it, I need to hear this and it's not getting through here at work on my 32 ohm consumer headphones. I'm breaking out the beast when I get home... my DT 1990s with the glorious 12db spike at 8.5KHz, to which I have tamed in TotalMixFX, but that correction is getting turned off in order to get proper inner ear damage and finally hear this thing. 
PaulieDC
Too much gear, not enough composing. Oy vey.
The regular consumer world has no idea what they are missing on this forum. Love it.
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Polkasound
Senior Member
What you're hearing in the isolated vocal track is something different, like an artifact from the isolation process or a tape splice from a dubbed vocal track. In the vocal-removed track, no one is going to be able to hear the voice I hear, but I can still hear a tiny bit of it only because I know exactly where it is.
I think the only chance anyone has of hearing it is to listen to the original track through a pair of headphones (mine are closed-back for maximum isolation) in a very quiet environment. But don't be discouraged if you can't hear it, because I had one huge advantage that none of you have... I wasn't listening for it. I wasn't prepping my brain to detect background talking. I was analyzing the faint string parts underneath the woodwinds, and that's when it surprised me.
LOL!!! I should note that unlike VI-Controllers who create orchestral covers by reading the sheet music, when I create pop/rock/country cover songs, I do it by listening critically to the audio and reproducing what I hear. I sucked at it when I was younger, but after 35 years, my ears are hyper-trained to detect some ridiculously obscure things in recorded audio.
Can anyone hear the bass singer in this choir who sounds like Harold Reid from the Statler Brothers? Hint... the voice is panned to the right, and you stand the best chance of hearing it if you focus on the second syllable in "people".
View attachment lastwaltz.mp3
PaulieDC
Too much gear, not enough composing. Oy vey.
Hmmmm... in that second syllable I'm only hearing a note played on a '72 metallic blue Fender P-Bass with rosewood fingerboard and a ding in the headstock from when the player whacked it into a lightstand at the Fillmore East when backing up Wilson Pickett. Bass singer, not so much.
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Polkasound
Senior Member
He's extremely buried in the mix but he's there, mostly singing the root, but on "people" he drops the second note down a 3rd which might help someone catch it.
If I get some extra time in the next day or two, I'll dub my voice over the music in the exact spot where the guy says, "The shadow," mimicking the same inflection so people can hear exactly what to listen for.
I'm hearing the electric bass on the V and then walking up the scale to the I. Is the vocal harmony on the V an octave higher, or same octave as the bass? I do seem to hear a doubling (that would low even for a bass singer).
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Polkasound
Senior Member
There are two bass instruments playing in unison on this recording... an acoustic and an electric tic-tac (but the tic-tac is barely discernible in this particular clip.) You heard correctly... the acoustic bass is walking up from the V (Ab1) to the I (Db2.)
The bass singer starts an octave higher on the V (Ab2)...
Ab2: "Too many peo..."
F2 to Eb2: "...ple..."
"... toge... C2
"ther." Db2
EDIT: I used SynthV to replicate what the bass singer is doing. Listen to this clip I made, and then you might be able to hear it in the original clip. (Warning, this clip is a lot softer in volume than the earlier one.)
View attachment lastwaltz2.mp3
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This took longer - 9 times - with a little help from the SynthV-friend but now I can't unhear it.
Thanks again.
So Db it is? Speed-down from D?
From https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=humperdinck+last+waltz
Most of these are in D.
Cinderella version is in Db. The oldest one in D.
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Polkasound
Senior Member
Apparently I'm working off the Cinderella version in Db. It seems the original is in D, but for my purposes it doesn't really matter since my client is having me recreate the song in Bb.
Holy Mac and cheese! The reverb on this version!
That helped and his part makes sense (passing parallel 5ths C-Dflat (bass singer) G-Aflat (lead singer) are interesting though. But listening back to the original clip, like you said, his voice is just barely detectable. I can hear him as part of the choir only on the d flat just before the clip ends. Impressive that you picked that part out!
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Yes very impressive of @Polkasound ! It has something to do with a focus on a narrow frequency band. That's why the SyntV version helped me finally detect it. Your ears keep their focus on that band.
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Polkasound
Senior Member
Back in the 1960s and '70s, reverb wasn't an effect... it was a musical instrument unto itself.
Thanks guys.
I've had years of practice parsing audio where I hyper-focus on it and pick out the individual notes of the instruments/sections. I keep getting better at it, but my ears are unfortunately going the opposite direction with age. Funny story.... [funny now, but not so funny at the time]... a few years back I was doing some contract sampling work for another developer. Unbeknownst to me, my studio had picked up some interference from a nearby radio station one day. The interference was in the form of vocal sibilants which blended perfectly with my hissy-sounding tinnitus. I sent out a whole bunch of recorded samples with "tss, chhh, sssh" faintly audible in the background, and had to re-record them all.EDIT:
Using my own voice to prime your ears, put your headphones on and see if you can hear the voice in the background prompting the words "the shadow!"
Music without my voice prompt:
View attachment The Shadow Blooper B.mp3
Music with my voice prompt:
View attachment The Shadow Blooper A.mp3
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Sooo tempted to post a picture of some toast and ask if you see the Virgin Mary in it ... 
Land of Missing Parts
Grumpy Monkey
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Polkasound
Senior Member
I very rarely start threads on VI-Control, but "the shadow" was such a fun find for me, I had to share it with everyone else. I assumed everyone else would hear it too, but the fact that people still aren't hearing it even after being shown exactly where it is and what it sounds like is very interesting.
Hearing this in the audio must be a lot like be a lot like looking at a stereogram. You can stare at a stereogram for minutes on end and see nothing. Then you relax your eyes just right until you start to see something happening. And then BAM! you can suddenly see the whole 3D image. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Once you hear "the shadow", you can't unhear it, as Maarten can attest. It's just a guy's voice, kind of muffled from being a few feet from the mic, dry (no reverb), panned mostly to the right.
Hearing this in the audio must be a lot like be a lot like looking at a stereogram. You can stare at a stereogram for minutes on end and see nothing. Then you relax your eyes just right until you start to see something happening. And then BAM! you can suddenly see the whole 3D image. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Once you hear "the shadow", you can't unhear it, as Maarten can attest. It's just a guy's voice, kind of muffled from being a few feet from the mic, dry (no reverb), panned mostly to the right.
