Now I can perceive the guy on the original clip (hollering "the shadow")! Just barely. The prompt file helped. The problem was it was so quick temporally and being so far in the background that without being shown where it was I simply couldn't perceive it (my ears heard it, and audio equipment produces it, but my brain didn't notice it).
Discovered a little "oops!" gem in old Engelbert Humperdinck recording
- Thread starter Polkasound
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Polkasound
Senior Member
Yep. It's so buried, it makes sense that the original engineers didn't even catch it. I've played the song before in my headphones and never noticed it. Then the other day I was trying to parse the strings under the flutes, so my ears were trained on the space in between the beats, and that's when I was completely surprised by it.
Very true, and an excellent point. I thought to myself, "could it possibly be another sound, like someone scraping a music stand or squeaking a chair, or could it be an aberration of interacting frequencies?" but I knew what it was the first time I heard it. I think my ears and brain just happened to be in the right listening mode at that moment to catch it.
From a recording standpoint, it seems odd that in a live studio, where that orchestra wouldn't have been cheap, there would be a guy whose job it was to yell out lyric prompts. Paper was invented by then, so it seems if Englebert was struggling to remember ... the title of the song(!), then maybe they could have printed out the lyrics for him. If you Google "Pictures of Frank Sinatra in the studio," in most of the image results, he has a music stand in front of him. So it's not like there was any shame in it. (Or at least not any more shame than needing a guy to yell lyrics at you.)
I'm not saying there's not a guy yelling "the shadow" in the clip, mind you. Who knows, maybe Engelbert had a nephew who needed a job. I can't hear it, though, even after about ten listens, so I gotta wonder whether it makes sense from a practical standpoint. (Either way, this is a fun thread.)
On a semi-related note, as someone who spent many years on 2" tape (I still have one of my 24-track machines here), this is really interesting:
As someone already suggested, based on the odd reverb cutoff in the punch-in, I think they recorded the reverb on the vocal track. I'm not positive on that, though.
Lastly, @Rob, what the heck did you use to isolate the vocal??? That sounds really good!
I'm not saying there's not a guy yelling "the shadow" in the clip, mind you. Who knows, maybe Engelbert had a nephew who needed a job. I can't hear it, though, even after about ten listens, so I gotta wonder whether it makes sense from a practical standpoint. (Either way, this is a fun thread.)
On a semi-related note, as someone who spent many years on 2" tape (I still have one of my 24-track machines here), this is really interesting:
That sounds exactly like they had recorded the whole line "I will be remembering, the shadow of your smile," and then decided to go back and punch in for a better take of the last half: "shadow of your smile." Definitely a punch in, since you can hear that he held "...ring" longer in the first take, since the tail of that is what we're hearing at the punch-in point. (I'm probably not the only old-timer here who can't help but tap my finger when I hear the point where the engineer should have punched in.)
As someone already suggested, based on the odd reverb cutoff in the punch-in, I think they recorded the reverb on the vocal track. I'm not positive on that, though.
Lastly, @Rob, what the heck did you use to isolate the vocal??? That sounds really good!
Rob
stale member
Ha that’s an app called RipX Daw, does a great job at separating instruments and vocals. And I think you are correct in saying that it was a punch-in, I was asking myself why there was that leftover “ing”
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Polkasound
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There's definitely multiple instances of punching or splicing going on there. It sounds like the original tracks are underneath, and you can hear them between where they punched out and punched in the final takes of the two lines. But guess what else I'm hearing... there's a pronounced "s" in one of the buried punched takes. It leads me to think Engelbert may have been stuck in a rut of singing, "...the smile of your..." which is maybe why someone would (perhaps snarkily out of the side of their mouth) say "the shadow" figuing it wouldn't get picked up by the mics. Not professional, but hey, some musicians are goofy people.
Feeding Engelbert the lyrics doesn't seem to make sense since they just could have written down "shadow" on a piece of paper, but over the decades I've worked with hundreds of musicians and vocalists in the studio, and some have had oddly debilitating brain blocks where they kept singing or playing a certain part wrong even when the lyrics/music was right in front of their eyes. So anything is possible.
