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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 2, 2004 20:22:59 GMT -5
Everyone, please take the time and vote.
Please think it through also.
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Post by Doc on Jun 3, 2004 2:22:43 GMT -5
I wonder if John might be singing very lightly in the lead vocal mix. Just under the original Paul track, which itself must have been a tiny bit incomplete. I think one thing from, well, a longtime ago may be right. The "very strange", is, especially the latter one, so James Paul.
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Post by -Wings- on Jun 3, 2004 4:00:55 GMT -5
I'm not sure anymore. The main voice throughout the song is different from Paul pre-1967, but is doesn't have the same exaggerated Liverpool dialect that early Faul had either. So I'm guessing it would be a stand-in voice, be it 'the imitator' or someone else.
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Post by JoJo on Jun 3, 2004 5:44:19 GMT -5
The vocal impersonator provides the main voice, but is the voice doubled or are there harmonies from John and/or George as well? If i recall, this voice is the one that made people think Klaatu was the Beatles reunited. Hey btw, welcome back Wings! How's college going, is the semester over?
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 3, 2004 8:00:25 GMT -5
I wonder if John might be singing very lightly in the lead vocal mix. Just under the original Paul track, which itself must have been a tiny bit incomplete. I think one thing from, well, a longtime ago may be right. The "very strange", is, especially the latter one, so James Paul. Yes I agree John's voice can be heard in the line "In summer".
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Post by scatman on Jun 3, 2004 8:30:19 GMT -5
Well count me as one who thinks it is Paul singing lead (or Faul if you will) although I agree that the line "In Summer" is Lennon.
A similar example in my mind would be "Getting Better" -- lead vocal sung by Paul but Lennon's sings "though I can't complain" as a counter lead vocal. Just my opinion.
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Post by jerriwillmore on Jun 3, 2004 16:20:53 GMT -5
I'd like to believe "Faul" both wrote and performed the song.
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Post by Doc on Jun 4, 2004 0:11:30 GMT -5
"Hello, Goodbye", for me personally, is where I really hear the "Klaatu" quality in the lead vocal.
Penny Lane, for lyrics and tune, is James Paul.
Lead vocals are semi buried in both Hello Goodbye and especially Penny Lane. The leads seems, to me, "soupy", as well as buried in both left and right, and awash in delay and reverb effects. I mean, by comparison, Ringo's vocal's are so "up front" in the mixes of Yellow Submarine and Octopus Garden, that you can almost hear saliva hitting the wind screen. He's been afforded no chorussing, no mixing him low, no one doubling his lead like George or John, you just hear Ringo's distinctive voice, edgy but likeable, hogging the mix.
But Paul's voice is mixed like a red-headed step-child in Penny Lane. Besides which, the EQ on Penny Lane seems calibrated to mellow out a lead vocal that is already barely peeping through the orchestration.
Its the only Beatles song (I love it anyway) that I ever thought sounded like a radio commercial for some product. Slick, processed, sheeny. But, then again, that would have been good for the radio play back in 1967.
I aint complaining. I couldn't have mixed it at all. Just observing.
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Post by southpaw on Jun 4, 2004 1:57:55 GMT -5
Penny Lane,Sorry but I don't hear JPM at all, neither do i hear faul. I hear the lennon overdubs but this is definatly an imitater. I do think the song is a JPM composistion, rushed to production shortly after his .... IMO "getting better" is a JPM composistion also. I know it would seem obvious that faul would be singing the lead on this one in the context of faul entering the group.Yet the song is written in a way that is too complex for faul to have written it.Lennon could have wrote it,but it reminds me of JPM's songs of 65,66 like she's leaving home etc.etc where JPM tells a story within a song dealing with issue's we are all affected by. I think that it is mearly a coincidence that this song includes the lyrics getting better in it. The rest of the lyrics in the song have nothing to do with PWR. I admit there are some strange overdubs in that song hinting possibly at a second paul voice(faul?) But that falsetto is unmistakable Don't get this song confused with a little help from my freinds which to me is about PWR
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Post by Doc on Jun 4, 2004 2:21:22 GMT -5
JPM sang hard live for years. For this, there is sometimes a slight rasp in the middle of certain vowels in the midrange of his voice. I hear this on a couple of lines, but not all. I hear it on , "Its a clean machine." "IN a shelter in the middle of a roundabout" and "shaves another KUUHS-TOMER", and the last "very strange."
For the rest of it-----mixed bag. A 3rd mystery voice in there. And its not the "Lady Madonna" voice. It may be the "Hello Goodbye voice.
The choruses are very stacked. I do hear John on the "in summer" line. Pungently present. I like John's voice---it had a "pungent" nasality. I mean this as a compliment.
I think of James Paul as "woody, grainy and masculine souding."
Ringo had a deep, rich sound, but drifted a bit. Accent was evident, of course. His tone was unnaffected but also sometimes imprecise.
George's voice seemed trapped in the throat, froggy at times, but always expressive. He was, at times, "Lennon Lite." There two voices shared an affinity of nasal trebelness. Ringos was actually balanced to my ears, as far as his main register goes. Paul's true voice was darker than we came to know it. His high notes had a more plaintiff ring (from effort) than most of us remember.
We are micro-nit-picking, though. All in all, Penny Lane and Hello Goodbye are solid classics because they sonically deserve to be.
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Post by scatman on Jun 4, 2004 6:39:13 GMT -5
I do not own a copy but I understand there is a single-tracked lead vocal version on the Anthology CDs (w/ a different piano sound and minus piccolo trumpet). Anybody have or heard this version? I would imagine the vocal sounds less "soupy" single tracked. Another possible reason the vocal may sound a bit lost in the mix: www.sgtpeppers.co.uk/straw.html'Penny Lane' innovated the recording process of 'bouncing down', to overcome the limitations of four track recording. On 'Penny Lane' three piano pieces and a harmonium were recorded to individual tracks. These were then mixed and 'bounced down' to a single track. This cleared three tracks for further instruments and vocals, allowing a gorgeous range of sound and tone, that to this day still sounds advanced.
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 4, 2004 8:51:35 GMT -5
An interesting side note about Penny Lane, in one interview George Martin was talking about how Paul came to him one day and said that he had heard a tremendously high trumpet the night before. George said it was a Bach trumpet and that yes he agreed it had a great high sound to it. Then Paul asked if they could use it in a song and George said okay and invited the guy from the London Symphony Orcestra to play that part on Penny Lane, which I think is the best musical part of the song.
What's also of note is who had that conversation with GM. Was it Paul or Bill? If it was Paul then the song would have been somewhat complete by the fall of 1966 and finished up, i.e. overdubbed with the imitator's voice, later on. Or what could have happened is that Paul had the song somewhat completed and got the idea for the piccolo trumpet and died before it was ever recorded on his song. Then with the idea still in mind George invited the London symphony guy to record on that song sometime in early 1967....
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Post by scatman on Jun 4, 2004 9:42:20 GMT -5
From "All You Need is Ears" by George Martin
This passage starts on p. 201:
"Following that [when I'm 64] came 'Penny Lane', which started life as a fairly simple song. But Paul decided he wanted a special sound on it, and one day, after he had been at a concert of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, he said, 'There's a guy in them playing this fantastic high trumpet.'
'Yes,' I said, 'the piccolo trumpet, the Bach trumpet. Why?'
It's a great sound. Why can't we use it?'
'Sure we can,' I said, and at that he asked me to organise it for him. Now, the normal trumpet is in Bb. But there is also the D trumpet, which is what Bach mostly used, and the F trumpet. In this case, I decided to use a Bb piccolo trumpet, an octave above the normal. To play it I engaged David Mason, who was with the London Symphony Orchestra. It was a difficult session, for two reasons. First, that little trumpet is a devil to play in tune, because it isn't really in tune with itself, so that in order to achieve pure notes the player has to 'lip' each one.
Secondly, we had no music prepared. We just knew that we wanted little piping interjections. We had had experience of professional musicians saying: 'If the Beatles were real musicians, they'd know what they wanted us to play before we came into the studio.' Happily, David Mason wasn't like that at all. By then the Beatles were very big news anyway, and I think he was intrigued to be playing on one of their records, quite apart from being well paid for his trouble. As we came to each little section where we wanted the sound, Paul would think up the notes he wanted, and I would write them down for David. The result was unique, something which had never been done in rock music before, and it gave 'Penny Lane' a very distinct character."
And he briefly revisits Penny Lane on p. 259 while talking about the composing/arranging relationship between Paul and himself:
"To hark back to an example - the use of the piccolo trumpet on 'Penny Lane': it is true that I arranged it, but equally true that Paul was thinking up the notes. If I had been left to myself. I honestly do not think I would have written such good notes for David Mason to play."
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Post by scatman on Jun 4, 2004 9:47:39 GMT -5
Please excuse my ignorance but where did the notion of a "vocal imitator" for Paul come from? Is this a carry-over from the 60IF stuff? Seems quite a few people accept this as fact.
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 4, 2004 10:07:44 GMT -5
Please excuse my ignorance but where did the notion of a "vocal imitator" for Paul come from? Is this a carry-over from the 60IF stuff? Seems quite a few people accept this as fact. I only accept the vocal imitator as true because in the song it doesn't sound 100% like James Paul to me and it doesn't sound like Faul overdubbed it either. There IS some carry over from 60IF yes as many of us are freely using the name Faul.
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Post by -Wings- on Jun 4, 2004 23:51:15 GMT -5
Hey btw, welcome back Wings! How's college going, is the semester over? Thanks. Yeah, the semester is done, and now I'm away from class for the season. I've been real busy with schoolwork these last few months. Now I'm working in a record store to pass the time this summer, and when I'm there there, I constantly see pictures of both original Paul and "Faul," so much so that it's rekindled my belief that Paul was replaced after Revolver. I don't believe we'll ever find out the full details ourselves, but it's still fun to chat about. Anyway, about the 60IF carry over..... there were a lot of good points over on that site that got buried by gobbledygook and wacky fantasies. A third Paul voice was one of them. It's especially apparent if you own the Anthology CDs how they would try different versions of songs with "Faul" and the mystery imitator until they found one that worked. I'll have to dig them out later to see if Penny Lane was one of those.
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Post by Doc on Jun 5, 2004 0:15:30 GMT -5
And then the distinctive voice of "Back in the USSR", "Lady Madonna", and there are 2 others, one inside the Big Medley of Abbey Road's Side 2, and I firgot the other one now. Those 4 lead vocals are consistent with each other. I guess it is either Bill in a charactor voice (is that the "Elvis" sound I heard mention of?), or is it yet a fourth voice?
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Post by FlamingPie on Jun 5, 2004 1:12:49 GMT -5
And then the distinctive voice of "Back in the USSR", "Lady Madonna", and there are 2 others, one inside the Big Medley of Abbey Road's Side 2, and I firgot the other one now. Those 4 lead vocals are consistent with each other. I guess it is either Bill in a charactor voice (is that the "Elvis" sound I heard mention of?), or is it yet a fourth voice? You Never Give Me Your Money. And Paul did that Elvis voice back in the Cavern. I'll find some way to get that posted.
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Post by southpaw on Jun 6, 2004 3:19:36 GMT -5
After listening to a newly aquired copy of the alternate Penny lane (you know the one without the bach trumpet) I starting to think this is actually is JPM. also I just finished watching that live back in the U.S.A tour DVD. Some of it is great He sounded spot on with songs like let it be, baby I'm amazed, Lady madonna,Blackbird, back in the ussr, hey jude and other solo stuff. Fool on the hill, getting better, hello goodbye, didn't sound quite right.(vocally) IMO all the early beatles covers were embarrassing, the earlier the tune the worse it sounded, some sounded like straight american country music. amusing to see paul looking at his fingers while playing bass on songs he's suppossedly played over 1000 times, not very impressive Yesterday sounded nice I also found it funny hearing phil spectors orchestration played on keyboard during the long and winding road. Beatles footage was minimal yet during fool on the hill Faul sings with a backdrop of telvesions playing scenes from the magical mystery tour film, showing the close ups of faul in french foothills. Very Strange Anyway can i change my vote ;D ;D ;D JPM and two other unknown voices, possibly lennon, faul
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Post by eyesbleed on Jun 6, 2004 8:13:17 GMT -5
amusing to see paul looking at his fingers while playing bass on songs he's suppossedly played over 1000 times, Ya.... watch the Ed Sullivan shows... JPM never had to look at what his fingers were doing. I found that to be one of the most impressive things about JPM back then. He looked like he was really enjoying everything, & always kept his eyes on the audience, or the camera,.... never the bass guitar. Same thing when he played Yesterday solo.... looking at those fret fingers just wasn't neccessary.
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Post by JoJo on Jun 6, 2004 20:59:00 GMT -5
Glad you brought that up Southpaw, yes, when he sings songs that are fully his his voice may sound older, a bit more quavery, but completely recognizable as the original singer. When he sang "I'm Down" live (I heard it on the Beatlesarama internet station, so I'm not sure if it was from the Moscow concert) it didn't sound natural, you can almost see him sweating profusely struggling to get it right.
Remember how in the old days of Wings, he wouldn't do more than one or two Beatlles songs? Don't know which one or two he would do, but I bet it wasn't the old ones. The reverse is true now, now it's mostly Beatles songs. Somewhere along the line, he got confident, or perhaps he can rely on us to understand or excuse his voice not sounding the same; "well he's not a young man anymore".
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 15, 2004 14:27:12 GMT -5
After listening to a newly aquired copy of the alternate Penny lane (you know the one without the bach trumpet) I starting to think this is actually is JPM. Are you referring to the Anthology?
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 18, 2004 20:24:22 GMT -5
Okay, on the Anthology II cd the version of Penny Lane sounds like all James Paul singing that song. You can tell it's one singer and you can tell it's James Paul. It's really quite nice listening to him alone sing this and it's also a little eerie at the same time. You kind of get a feeling of what it would be like if he had sung all of his own songs, the ones that Bill performed later on.
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Post by JoJo on Jun 19, 2004 7:16:24 GMT -5
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Post by DarkHorse on Jun 19, 2004 14:21:39 GMT -5
Very fascinating! Notice the difference on the line "On the corner is a banker with a motorcar" particularly the word 'corner' as it sounds so different on the 'raw' version with just James Paul than on the completed version. Some spots were filled in more than others I guess. But this first version is all James Paul with the exception of the harmony backup vocals by John. You can also hear JP added his own voice in the chorus "Penny Lane is in my ears...". Isn't that called double tracking? They probably could have left the vocals the way they were but had to get everyone used to Bill's voice so maybe I am thinking Bill overdubbed his voice, not the imitator. It's possible but I think the vocals were fine as they were in the first version. It almost sounds complete with the exception of the piccolo trumpet solo. Great! Thanks Jojo.
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