Question for those who seem to have inside info on certain MJ tracks (regarding 2000watts)

JichaelMackson

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I seem to remember that MJ was disappointed that he had to cut 2000 Watts for the Invincible album. It was initially longer with a long instrumental outdo or so my mind remembers it.
Did anyone hear this version or story or did I invent it in my head :p ?
 
That's a very interesting question. I always wondered what the wisdom was behind a song like that. You could tell that Michael wanted to do something completely different and try out a new idea but it came across as a very unusual recording (in my opinion). Do you remember if Joe Vogel had anything to say about it in his book?
 
MoeJack;4282762 said:
Do you remember if Joe Vogel had anything to say about it in his book?

I pulled up my copy of Vogel’s book, and he doesn’t say anything other than the usual: it was written for Tyrese Gibson, Michael wound up taking it for himself, and that Teddy Riley insists the vocal is unedited (even though it clearly isn’t).

As for OP’s question, I haven’t heard that rumor before. Interested to see if anyone knows more!
 
‘2000 Watts’ is originally longer (by 1-2 minutes), but that is hardly surprising since most of his songs are originally longer.

That is because they used to originally record longer versions of most of his songs, mainly for practical reasons: this would allow them later to cut specific parts from each song and thus to make them shorter for specific purposes (such as, for radio versions, for singles versions, for versions aimed at on-stage performances, etc).

Also, what you hear in ‘2000 Watts’ is Michael Jackson’s real, deep voice.

Teddy Riley is right about that because Michael Jackson’s vocals are actually unedited in the ‘2000 Watts’ song.

Teddy Riley has also mentioned numerous occasions where Michael Jackson would intentionally talk to him with that deep voice (such as, during phone pranks).

Michael Jackson also sings with his real, deep voice in certain sections of his ‘Shout’ song (a song that comes also from the same recording sessions).
 
MJ's vocals are pitched down on 2000 Watts. You can hear the artifacts just by listening to the released version.
 
SmoothGangsta;4282832 said:
MJ's vocals are pitched down on 2000 Watts. You can hear the artifacts just by listening to the released version.

The theory which claims that his vocals are pitched-down (on ‘2000 Watts’) is not true.

Teddy Riley, who worked on that song, he was asked about that matter and he confirmed Michael Jackson's real, deep/low voice on that song:

“Yes. He did sing that low [in ‘2000 Watts’]… the only effect I put on him vocal after he sung it was the Yamaha symphonic preset…” (Teddy Riley)

Michael Jackson used to sing live certain parts of his songs with his real, deep voice even while performing, and not just while recording in the studio.
 
mj_frenzy;4282833 said:
The theory which claims that his vocals are pitched-down (on ‘2000 Watts’) is not true.

Teddy Riley, who worked on that song, he was asked about that matter and he confirmed Michael Jackson's real, deep/low voice on that song:

“Yes. He did sing that low [in ‘2000 Watts’]… the only effect I put on him vocal after he sung it was the Yamaha symphonic preset…” (Teddy Riley)

Michael Jackson used to sing live certain parts of his songs with his real, deep voice even while performing, and not just while recording in the studio.

Teddy publicly supported the Cascio tracks as genuine. No credibility.
 
ChrisC;4282840 said:
Teddy publicly supported the Cascio tracks as genuine. No credibility.

It is not just Teddy Riley who confirmed his real, deep/low voice on ‘2000 Watts’.

There are other sources as well, such as Isabelle Stegner-Petitjean, who confirmed that in her analysis about Michael Jackson’s voice throughout his career.

Among other things, she writes that, in ‘2000 Watts’ Michael Jackson sings the song with his real low, chest voice.
 
mj_frenzy;4282833 said:
The theory which claims that his vocals are pitched-down (on ‘2000 Watts’) is not true.

Teddy Riley, who worked on that song, he was asked about that matter and he confirmed Michael Jackson's real, deep/low voice on that song:

“Yes. He did sing that low [in ‘2000 Watts’]… the only effect I put on him vocal after he sung it was the Yamaha symphonic preset…” (Teddy Riley)

Michael Jackson used to sing live certain parts of his songs with his real, deep voice even while performing, and not just while recording in the studio.

Like I said, you can hear it's pitched down. Pitching vocals introduces a certain sound to audio and it's all over 2000 Watts.
 
mj_frenzy;4282831 said:
That is because they used to originally record longer versions of most of his songs, mainly for practical reasons: this would allow them later to cut specific parts from each song and thus to make them shorter for specific purposes (such as, for radio versions, for singles versions, for versions aimed at on-stage performances, etc).

This was the case with the production for the BAD album. It had all changed by the Dangerous album, as by then it was not an industry standard anymore to include alternative mixes or "extended" versions of the original production on maxi singles. Michael might still have loved to do loooong songs anyway, but that was just him, not done for a specific purpose.


mj_frenzy;4282831 said:
Also, what you hear in ‘2000 Watts’ is Michael Jackson’s real, deep voice.

Teddy Riley is right about that because Michael Jackson’s vocals are actually unedited in the ‘2000 Watts’ song.

That's again not a fact. It's mj_frenzy believing unreflected what other (in this case self-discredited) people publicly say and because mj_frenzy's own hearing isn't that great, as we've seen in various previous discussions and as we can also see in this next quote:


mj_frenzy;4282831 said:
Michael Jackson also sings with his real, deep voice in certain sections of his ‘Shout’ song (a song that comes also from the same recording sessions).

In contrary to "2000 Watts", there is no artificially lowered voice in "Shout".
 
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mj_frenzy;4282844 said:
It is not just Teddy Riley who confirmed his real, deep/low voice on ‘2000 Watts’.

There are other sources as well, such as Isabelle Stegner-Petitjean, who confirmed that in her analysis about Michael Jackson’s voice throughout his career.

Among other things, she writes that, in ‘2000 Watts’ Michael Jackson sings the song with his real low, chest voice.

Being a "Musicologist, teacher, author, lecturer & mum" (as it states on her facebook page) does not necessarily include having the ears to idenfity / understand such subtle technical details about vocal processing herself.




I looked a little more into those quotes....


Isabelle Stegner-Petitjean:

In her only MJ related publication "The voice in the mirror", she nowhere addresses the question if the vocals on "2000 Watts" are purely natural or have additionally been lowered / processed. The only paragraph mentioning the song:

If the voice’s nasal position is seldom taken into account in Michael Jackson’s habits, the head voice is far more used although very often imperceptible thanks to a homogeneous management during the change of register. This head voice, confined to a very high-pitched tessitura no more goes with a loss of clarity and vocal strength than the extremely low-pitched chest voice of a song such as “2000 watts”. It is worth highlighting that Michael Jackson’s use of a de-toned head voice is due, in the few existing cases, to environmental or emotional reasons and not to a technical flaw – part of the work with Seth Riggs being focused on the vocal enrichment of vowels and their purified and distinct enunciation, even in the far ends of the tessitura.
https://journals.openedition.org/volume/3851

No confirmation there, at all.




Teddy Riley:

Your quote is a mash-up of two different quotes, taken out of two different contexts.


One is from an online Q&A from 2010 on a now defunct website (http://www.formspring.me/AskTeddyRiley/q/1827363570)
Google still finds several mj fan sites who copied the full fan question and Teddy's answer. It goes:

ちょうどformspringにテディのQ&Aがあったので

Hey Teddy, can you clear up about 2000 watts. You said this is MJ singing low with out being pitched down. Has *anything* been done to the vocal, it seems like there is an effect on it. It's exciting to hear him sing that low if, true.

Teddy Riley AskTeddyRiley

The only effect I put on him vocal after he sung it was the yamaha symphonic preset.

AskTeddyRiley answered 4 days ago

He avoids answering the full question by only replying about the use of effects.

If Teddy does not semantically consider it an "effect" and the obviously altered vocal pitch on "2000 Watts" instead results from manipulating the recording speed while Michael sang, then Teddy's comment can perfectly be the truth, while at the same time it's also true that Michaels natural vocal didn't sound like this when he sang it.


The other quote is from Twitter 2009:

Unbenannt1.jpg


This seems like a direct confirmation. But it still doesn't convince me, because:

1.) Again he seems to avoid answering the actual question, in favour to not start controversy by going anywhere near "did Michael Jackson need vocal processing" (like all the autotune clowns of todays music), while at the time, only a few months after his death, Michael received nothing but love from everywhere and Teddy was probably in high hopes to work / already working on well-paid posthumous MJ projects.

Vocal processing is usually considered not a glorious thing... it's something that's necessary when singers can't properly sing. In the case of "2000 Watts" it rather was a creative thing, to add a little more dark power to the vocal. But explain all that to the normal, mourning listener in a (back then) 140 characters limited tweet....

So I think he avoids "was Michaels voice processed" and only goes on about "could Michael sing low", as we all know that is something many people wonder about, as Michael has always been known for having that high voice, making him the butt of jokes til this day.

2.) In 2010 Teddy repeatedly lied about the authenticity of the vocals on the Cascio songs, because it fit his agenda back then. (In 2013 he tweeted he was "set up", confirming the lie.)

3.) Ears...



My personal take on it:

Michael sang the lowest he could on this song and additionally the pitch was also slightly lowered.

They likely did that by speeding up the music playback a tiny bit (which also raises the pitch of the music). Michael sang to this, and then the whole recording was put back to the original slower speed and deeper pitch of the music. Which made the recording of his voice appear slightly unnaturally lower than usual.

This type of recording-speed manipulation was the old school way of (in a more extreme way) creating high Mickey Mouse type or low monster cartoon voices before the digital age of recording, while now such things can be done in real time or by digitally processing vocal recordings. So if this old technique was used, one can get away with saying that no "effect" was used on the vocals in "2000 Watts".

And guess what, that's the same technique Isabelle Stegner-Petitjean describes Bruce Swedien began using early on for Michael to record overdub vocal layers to add depth. So Michael was familiar with this technique.


But the singer’s vocal harmonization also led to other specific recording processes. Indeed, very early in his collaboration with Michael Jackson, Bruce Swedien grabbed the opportunity to create, from the singer’s voice, a sound perspective using the width and depth of the space.

He explains that the artist’s vocal abilities, coupled with his interest and his liking for sound experiments, made him a great laboratory of experiments.

Moreover, Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson being always enthusiastic about Bruce Swedien’s creative sense, the latter was always entirely free to bring his own personality to music.

It is in this favorable context that, supporter of natural techniques, Bruce Swedien had Michael Jackson make, singing live, effects on the dubbing of his main voice: to give even more relief to the sound texture of these vocal blocks, the sound engineer would very slightly slow down the recording of the main voice during the dubbing (three or four percents), and thus, at the same time, very slightly lower its tone.

Michael Jackson would record the dubbing keeping into account this new micro-tone.

Then, Bruce Swedien would combine the two voices, with their near imperceptible gap in frequency, by mixing the sound level of the double track slightly below that of the vocal lead.

This technique, which needs a good relative sense of tone and a great vocal precision, as Bruce Swedien, for which this experiment remained unique, underlines, allowed bringing support to the voice by enriching its sound spectrum in a natural and real way, without resorting to any artificial reprocessing.
https://journals.openedition.org/volume/3851
 
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Electro, your constant, smartass attitude to anyone who disagrees with you has become too boring.

Concerning the thread’s question, the original duration of ‘2000 Watts’ is 5:34.

So, it was originally longer by more than 1 minute, as compared to the album’s version of that song.

But all the songs (on the ‘Invincible’ album) were originally longer right before their final mix for the album.
 
SmoothGangsta;4282847 said:
Like I said, you can hear it's pitched down. Pitching vocals introduces a certain sound to audio and it's all over 2000 Watts.

According to people who worked on the ‘Invincible’ album, only filters were applied to Michael Jackson’s real, deep singing voice on the ‘2000 Watts’ song.

So, they also confirmed that the pitch of his vocals (on the song) was not modified at all.

Bruce Swedien was also asked about that, and he did not say that Michael Jackson’s vocals were pitched-down on the song.
 
Electro, your constant, smartass attitude to anyone who disagrees with you has become too boring.


Kind of funny that this is coming from you. And it sounds like a rendition of things others recently have said about you on here. Must have hurt?

I and those others are just trying to clean up after you and your constantly delivered MESS of no-source-provided claims, unreflected out-of-context quotes mixed with personal spectulations sometimes bordering to basic-logic-defeating tabloidish nonsense. Which, all together, you keep presenting as stone cold facts, and which you can't wait to add to about every new thread made on here.

Look at your reply. Who's the one with the attitude issue here? You can't handle being questioned or refuted.

Have you ever asked yourself why exactly you are posting on here?
 
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Don't really need the multitrack to hear that the vocals are pitched. It's very apparent when you know what to listen for.
 
mj_frenzy;4282894 said:
the original duration of ‘2000 Watts’ is 5:34.

Correct. I can confirm this since I have it.
However if YOU are honest with your fellow fans you could either state that you don't know where that info originates from or that you remember Sony mistakenly issued a certain official item that comes with this info. The question is: Do you KNOW this item?
It is also possible you came across the playtime since I did infact answer this in the past.


mj_frenzy;4282894 said:
But all the songs (on the ‘Invincible’ album) were originally longer right before their final mix for the album.

Incorrect.
 
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Korgnex;4282993 said:
Correct. I can confirm this since I have it.
However if YOU are honest with your fellow fans you could either state that you don't know where that info originates from or that you remember Sony mistakenly issued a certain official item that comes with this info. The question is: Do you KNOW this item?
It is also possible you came across the playtime since I did infact answer this in the past.


[QUOTEBut all the songs (on the ‘Invincible’ album) were originally longer right before their final mix for the album.
[/QUOTE]


If you have it you should share it perhaps then the estate will stop releasing horrible project after horrible project (scream, this is it anniversary, possible fake tracks, possible release of HIStory tour).

I'm not sure if fans realize but all they do (the estate) is tarnish MJ's reputation. Now give us the stuff we really want and stop these pointless releases. Take a look at what Bob Dylan gives his fans, that's respect!
 
Electro, your constant, smartass attitude to anyone who disagrees with you has become too boring.

To be fair mj_frenzy, Electro took all of the information that you presented and located the original source so that we can come to a sound conclusion about its validity. Perhaps there is truth to what you're both saying, in slightly different ways.

I and those others are just trying to clean up after you and your constantly delivered MESS of no-source-provided claims, unreflected out-of-context quotes mixed with personal spectulations sometimes bordering to basic-logic-defeating tabloidish nonsense.

Now now Electro, I think you did a great job of identifying the sources to that information so that we can correctly identify fact from friction. But I don't think mj_frenzy meant any offense, some information just gets lost in translation from the original source, which we all need to be more careful about.

I think this has been a constructive discussion to figure out what really went down with the recording of 2000 Watts. It's all for love!
 
MoeJack;4283025 said:
I think this has been a constructive discussion to figure out what really went down with the recording of 2000 Watts. It's all for love!

There is not even one single official word that says that Michael Jackson’s vocals are pitched-down on ‘2000 Watts’.

Only some fans who like to pass themselves off as experts claim that his vocals are pitched-down on ‘2000 Watts’.

Sound engineer Stuart Brawley has also confirmed that Michael Jackson’s voice on ‘2000 Watts’ is his real, deep singing voice.

Also, for example, in certain lines from his ‘Burn This Disco Out’ song he also sings with his real, deep singing voice (such as, the “everybody just get on down” line).

Or, listen towards the end of his ‘Man In The Mirror’ performance at the 1988 Grammy Awards where he sings few times the word “You”, again with his real, deep singing voice.

There are, of course, many other examples where Michael Jackson sings with his real, deep singing voice as he does on the ‘2000 Watts’ song.
 
Yes, Stuart Brawley who helped create the cascio tracks, very reliable. It It is just something you can hear. I am not passing myself off as an expert for knowing what vocal pitching sounds like :scratch: Those other examples you listed do not sound anything like 2000 watts and are clearly not pitched. Anyway this is where I sign out from this thread as it's just gonna go on forever lol.
 
mj_frenzy;4283038 said:
Also, for example, in certain lines from his ‘Burn This Disco Out’ song he also sings with his real, deep singing voice (such as, the “everybody just get on down” line).

Or, listen towards the end of his ‘Man In The Mirror’ performance at the 1988 Grammy Awards where he sings few times the word “You”, again with his real, deep singing voice.

There are, of course, many other examples where Michael Jackson sings with his real, deep singing voice as he does on the ‘2000 Watts’ song.



Ever wondered why there is no controversy around the sound of those songs vocals?
The point is that the low in "2000 Watts" appears to be a different one, that is not heard in any other song of Michael.

Regarding the few available "official" short vague public quotes we have from people who were involved in the production (just Teddy, as it looks here), I tried to demonstrate, that they are not untouchable. Context is everything.

An additional thought on that would be...
We don't even know to what exact extent these people were involved with the production of this song. It was always a team of several people who worked on different things at different times. Teddy Riley, known as "the finisher", often only came in at the end, or just worked on polishing specific things. Bruce Swedien, especially with the later albums, was often only involved with the post-production (mixing). So it's possible that not everyone involved with this song would actually be able to know or care that much about every single step that happened with the recording or treatment of the vocals.
 
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An additional thought on that would be...
We don't even know to what exact extent these people were involved with the production of this song. It was always a team of several people who worked on different things at different times. Teddy Riley, known as "the finisher", often only came in at the end, or just worked on polishing specific things. Bruce Swedien, especially with the later albums, was often only involved with the post-production (mixing). So it's possible that not everyone involved with this song would actually be able to know or care that much about every single step that happened with the recording or treatment of the vocals.

Yes that may be true but i'm sure Bruce Swedien who has been a professional mixing engineer for over 50 years could tell when vocals has been artificially tampered with. Same goes for Teddy Riley.
 
Yes that may be true but i'm sure Bruce Swedien who has been a professional mixing engineer for over 50 years could tell when vocals has been artificially tampered with. Same goes for Teddy Riley.

I think so too. What they will say in public can be a different pair of shoes though, especially with Teddy Riley.

So far I've seen no quote regarding this from Bruce btw.
 
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