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:
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