Thanks for keeping the correspondence going and posting it here, kreen. Although I agree with Bumper that Angelo seems to mostly just be hypothesizing as we all are about the songs, it is still interesting to get direct input from someone who worked on the tracks.
kreen;3710559 said:
2- As you know, the vibrato on the Cascio tracks is pretty “shaky”. Those who believe a fraud took place hold that no post-production technique – no music software, no studio trickery – could explain MJ’s natural voice changing into such a weak, shaky vibrato : it has to be an impersonator.
This is not true, kreen. No one, as far as I know, has said that no techniques exist that can digitally add a vibrato to vocals. The whole point of discussion has been that Teddy Riley said that the vibrato sounded the way it did as a result of pitch correction with Melodyne.
Which brings me to:
2. The shakey vibrato could be an artifact from pitch correction if the original pitch was sharp (dropping the pitch can make things sound deeper and slower).
Indeed, which is why I am not sure why he believes dropping the pitch would lead to the very fast vibrato that we hear on the tracks. Dropping the pitch, as he mentions here, would lead to a perhaps shaky but stretched out vibrato, not an extremely fast one. Btw, the overall vocals on some of the Cascio tracks seem pitched up (which could explain the extremely fast vibrato).
A few other reasons why I believe the vibrato on the Cascio tracks is not an artifact of pitch correction:
-The vocals sound relatively clean. The other artifacts that pitch correction with Melodyne produces are almost completely missing. Again I point to this example of extreme Melodyning. You can hear the familiar artifacts that give the voice that really unnatural/distorted feel. Yet there is no shaky vibrato to be found:
[video=youtube_share;dUDYEu6TYCU]http://youtu.be/dUDYEu6TYCU[/video]
And this one (by the same YouTube user):
[video=youtube_share;WJb9SxNUTRo]http://youtu.be/WJb9SxNUTRo[/video]
(just to give another MJ related example of it, you can hear it in some lines in I'll Be There and Human Nature in TII too)
-The shaky vibrato can be heard in 'natural' places. What I mean by that is that we do not hear the vibrato in the middle of a line, where it would seem out of place, but only at the end of lines/long notes, etc, where one might naturally expect a vibrato. If the vibrato would purely be a side-effect of pitch correction, this would mean that MJ sang flat notes (in other words screwed up) exactly at these places and nowhere else.
-The shaky vibrato can be heard all over the songs. It's not like there are one or two weird vibratos in one of the songs, the shaky vibrato is heard everywhere and on all the tracks. This would mean that almost every line MJ sang needed pitch correction. You are telling me that MJ, who was known for his extremely good pitch control, would sing that badly? A counter argument could be that they changed the melody of the songs and needed to alter the pitch of MJ's vocals accordingly. But it seems very far-fetched that they would alter the melody of every song after the fact at the expense of the vocals, and also only change the melody at those places where a singer might use vibrato (as I mentioned above). And again, the You Rock My World clip above is an example of completely changing the original melody -> yet, no Cascio-like vibrato is to be found.
Combined with the fact that the vibrato sounds very much like Jason Malachi's, whose other vocal characteristics can also be found all over the songs, I personally think there is really not much support for the 'artifact-theory'. Btw, I also think people have focused too much on the vibrato, when it is just one of the many vocal characteristics that does not match up with MJ's voice.
Also, Autotune has a parameter for adding vibrato -in other words it can track the pitch so tightly that it takes away a singer's natural vibrato and it can recreate it by introducing it's own warble (which the user can set speed and variation). You can download an online instruction manual from Anteres to read more about this. In fact, you could download a free trial and try this yourself and experiment to get an idea of how it effects the voice.
Just to be clear once more, creating a vibrato digitally is certainly possible. The question here is: why would they do that? And secondly, this does not match with Teddy's explanation that the vibrato is the result of pitch correction (in other words, an unfortunate side-effect).
Angelo, if you are reading this topic and are willing to respond, it would be great to further discuss this with you. Thanks for your input thus far!
