Hi Bernard,
I assume you are the person who contacted me on Gearslutz. Unfortunately, I never got a straight story as to where they were with MJ in the process. Porte had written on quite a few songs with him and supposedly MJ had laid down some roughs, other things were going to be done later etc. Most of my conversation with Porte centered around the mixes as opposed to the logistics of when they were going to track vocals. We tracked some background vocals for Keep Your Head Up with Katia Cadet in late May and then I was mixing. I sent them my mixes in early June and MJ passed away a few weeks later so there certainly (= probability) was time for MJ to have recorded his tracks.
On the other hand, I remember hearing the MJ track with headphones after it was released and thinking, "This could be MJ, but it's not MJ doing a great vocal." Maybe that was a rough, maybe it was because of his physical condition and the fact that he had grown older. The only raw MJ tracks I have ever heard were when they did the transfers of Thriller for the 25th anniversary (for Kanye to remix). Because I was an producer/A&R consultant for Sony at the time, I was in the studio and able to listen to all the tracks individually. Listening to MJ's vocal on it's own demonstrated what a great singer he was. Absolutely killer. However, that was 25 years earlier when MJ was young and healthy.
If you want an answer you have to figure out what MJ did between June 3 when I sent the final mix and June 25 when he passed away (and account for the fact that there may have been a guide that MJ had sung during the songwritng that could have been used after the fact).
Regards,
Angelo
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Hi Bernard,
I can't say with any certainty about what Porte and Cascio (Angel as we called him) had done vocally with MJ on any of the songs that I worked on. I worked on 3 or 4 songs for which they sent me audio and Porte's guide vocals only. Porte does sound a lot like MJ himself.
From what your telling me that Porte and Angelo claimed, it would make sense to me. I know that they had worked on tracks for MJ at Angel's NJ studio (I think they did one of the bonus tracks on the Thriller 25th there), and I was under the impression that they had done guides with MJ on the songs we were working on. Again, I never sat there and drilled them on exactly what they had or hadn't done, because it wasn't relevant to what I was doing. Usually if you're writing with an artist the artist will sing the track to make sure the key is good, the song sounds good with their voice etc, so I would assume that there were some guides done by MJ based on the normal way things are done.
I'm sure this is a tough nut to crack. If you know for sure MJ didn't record after I sent the mixes, well, it's very likely that there were existing guide vox the producer had at their disposal. Beyond that it becomes very murky. There are so many studio tricks that are used on singers to enhance their voices (their = voices of anyone who records them) which are just part of modern pop music (pitch correction, copying words from other parts of the song, comping between takes, sliding things around, having another singer's voice blended in subtly to enhance the sound of the lead vocalist) and no doubt that if the producer were working with MJ's rough vocals they were using some of those tricks, which I'm sure MJ himself had used on previous albums (as everyone does to some degree).
You can quote me on the discussion forums but please send me a link to anything you post so I can verity that I'm being quoted correctly.
Hope this helps,
Angelo
