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Dream Theater => Dream Theater => Topic started by: Darkstarshades on April 26, 2015, 04:52:45 PM
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The worst of singing
For me, easily, Constant Motion and TDEN. Even Portnoy sounds pretty bad.
Surrounded doesn't sound pretty cool either.
However, since I consider Chaos in Motion to be barely enjoyable because of Labrie and Portnoy's singing... I wouldn't count it...
So, probably the worst one is... Finally Free from Live Scenes. The last chorus is simply ruined completely.
Your thoughts?
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Leaving CiM out of the equation, I'll probably go with Live at Budokan, especially because every other aspect of it is so good, makes James' weaker performance stand out more. They played another show not long before Budokan, plus the evening with format really wore him out (even though he got quite some time to rest, with the BTL jam and Instrumedley). James is huge favorite of mine, but this performance is a chore to listen to sometimes and hinders and otherwise nearly perfect release (I'm not 100% happy with the setlist either). He gets progressively worse, so ITNoG is a logical choice, but Only a Matter of Time is probably the low point of his singing.
I don't really like his Live in Tokyo performance either, albeit it's widely appreciated on DTF, he forced himself to much and doesn't always come out on top with that way over-the-top performance.
Live Scenes features some rough singing as well, but Portnoy is the worst offender there, he flat-out ruined the beginning of Home with those annoying accents (hiiigh-YAAAAAOOOOAAHHH). He acknowledges it in the commentary that he really hated how it came out and his vocals were never intended to be as loud in the mix as they ended up being. (We had an argument before on DTF about how much control do musicians have over the final product - this is an instance which proves that they don't always exert control over every aspect of the production). I like James' energy and timbre on this release (even the way he worked around not being able to reach the F# on LtL), although it's obvious that this wasn't a good live period for him (either).
He's hands off the best on Score and on the last two releases. His timbre, his range and power are all there and he often sings better (more to my liking) than in the studio version of certain songs, which never happened before. A good example is the last chorus of OTBOA on LALP and the "Hidden by disguise" section of ToT on BTFW.
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If it were live performance period, I'd say Once in a Livetime without hesitation.
When that album came out, I had been riding the waves of telling all my friends how awesome DT was ever since 1992. When OiaLT came out in 98ish, I was too embarrassed about JLB's performance to show it to anyone. To this day, it is the live album that collects dust. I can listen to ANY other JLB performance, even something as shaky as CiM, but OiaLT is just the bottom of JLB's barrel to me.
Thank goodness the DVD is a bit more of a "mixed bag"....a vast improvement over the CD.
Worst of the live DVD's would probably be LiT. But I still love it.
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Chaos In Motion and Budokan. And I really enjoy his vocals on OIALT, it was above the average of that tour, which I remind you was the first full and lenghty tour after the food poisoning, and the moment when his voice really broke down (if you listen to the 1995 shows, he still retained much of his range and power intact, at the same time showing clear and distinct signs of phisical suffering in delivering the most demanding lines).
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Budokan, definitely. I'd take CIM vox over it.
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OIALT. Unlistenable in many spots. Budokan is quite good aside from PMU and ITNOG, where he was definitely sounding tired.
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Probably Chaos in Motion. Score was surprisingly good, considering the time period.
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Once in a Livetime...Take Away My Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaainnnnn...
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Not getting the votes for Budokan. Most of it is good, like Blob said, only a few rough spots.
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I wish it was an official release, but since it was so widely circulated it's probably a pretty good chance that most people here have seen it. The show from Jan 24 1995 in Japan. His vocals were just way off. I'm pretty sure that wasn't too long after his food poison incident.
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CiM might be the "worst" in many people's opinions, but LITS on that DVD is amazing! Just can't stop myself from listening to it. The vocals somehow add a strange feeling to the song which makes it far better emotionally, at least for me.
Other than that, to answer the question, I sadly have to go with Budokan DVD. James starts on fire but apperantly he gets way too tired to cope with the songs further on, especially ITNOG and it's last verses. Everything on that DVD is almost perfect, wish James was too :sad: Although, no matter how bad James might sound on an evening, I still love him way too much ;D
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Not getting the votes for Budokan. Most of it is good, like Blob said, only a few rough spots.
Never understood it myself. It definitely has some rough spots, like the last two songs, and Endless Sacrifice, but aside from that, it's all good, and the FII material in particular sounds great, and is what got me into the album in the first place.
I find LSFNY and OIALT to be much rougher performances overall, although LSFNY makes up for that with its energy and fun.
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Not getting the votes for Budokan. Most of it is good, like Blob said, only a few rough spots.
Never understood it myself. It definitely has some rough spots, like the last two songs, and Endless Sacrifice, but aside from that, it's all good, and the FII material in particular sounds great, and is what got me into the album in the first place.
I find LSFNY and OIALT to be much rougher performances overall, although LSFNY makes up for that with its energy and fun.
I agree with all of that.
But I still like both of those better than CIM.
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Once in a Livetime
Chaos in Motion
Budokan
:lol
Oh, DTF.
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I was listening to CIM the other day and love surrounded with the pink floyd mother solo, but the vocals are horrible.
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I was listening to CIM the other day and love surrounded with the pink floyd mother solo, but the vocals are horrible.
... and Sugar Mice...
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The rankings of vocal performance on DVDs go something like this:
LaLP
LiT
Score
BTFW
LSFNY
LaB
5YIALT
CiM
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If it were live performance period, I'd say Once in a Livetime without hesitation.
When that album came out, I had been riding the waves of telling all my friends how awesome DT was ever since 1992. When OiaLT came out in 98ish, I was too embarrassed about JLB's performance to show it to anyone. To this day, it is the live album that collects dust. I can listen to ANY other JLB performance, even something as shaky as CiM, but OiaLT is just the bottom of JLB's barrel to me.
This, for me.
CiM is spotty. Some good. Some not so good. Sucks too, because it can be easily verified since this tour was so heavily bootlegged, that James had LOTS of performances that were better than many of the ones that were chosen.
I have NO problem with LSFNY or L@B. Yeah, there are some songs where James is a little shaky or tired. But overall, they are both mostly VERY good from the vocal standpoint. Heck, I have Maiden official releases where Bruce sounds just as shaky (or moreso) than the songs where James does on these two releases. I still listen to and love both of these releases.
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I'm still wondering why some are saying Once in a Livetime, since that is not a live DVD performance, and most of what it is on 5 Years in a Livetime is not from that live album. JLB actually sounds good on most of 5YIAL, outside of that one shriek near the end of Learning to Live. You know the one. :lol :lol
Anyway, I don't see how the answer is anything but Chaos in Motion. Not only is his performance overall not very good, but there is like some weird effect on his voice at times.
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I'm still wondering why some are saying Once in a Livetime, since that is not a live DVD performance, and most of what it is on 5 Years in a Livetime is not from that live album. JLB actually sounds good on most of 5YIAL, outside of that one shriek near the end of Learning to Live. You know the one. :lol :lol
Anyway, I don't see how the answer is anything but Chaos in Motion. Not only is his performance overall not very good, but there is like some weird effect on his voice at times.
Don't forget the high part of TTT.
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Eh, whatever. Live At The Marquee is still my favorite DVD of theirs.
As far as TTT, I almost give James a pass and put any blame for that on whichever knucklehead thought it would be a good idea to put that in the set.
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LiT/OIALT is still my absolute favorite. I know it's not the best, but there's something magical about that performance.
LSFNY would be no. 2, with Score a close third.
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CIM, the bootleg 'tinny' production made James sound horrible. Not his fault, when I seen him in Seattle on that tour his vocals were spot on! Also soundboard recordings are mostly crap and lose any of the live energy. James got the big shaft on the chaos in motion dvd release..
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Also soundboard recordings are mostly crap and lose any of the live energy. James got the big shaft on the chaos in motion dvd release..
Are you implying that the audio on CiM is just a soundboard? Because I'm almost positive that it's not - IIRC, it's the first tour where they did multi-track recordings of every single show on tour, instead of MP simply recording direct to DAT (altho he may still have done that too).
But for the record, while soundboard recordings may sound somewhat lifeless in comparison to audience recordings, by and large I'll take a soundboard recording over an audience recording. There's very few exceptions that rule for me.
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Good question, it seems as some of the songs are and some are not. Surrounded seems to be a subpar soundboard recording along with Constant Motion, Dark eternal night and more. The songs recorded in Vancouver BC sound more professional. I'm not positive though..
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I also have to say, there's an amount of natural "sugarcoating" when you're at the venue. I was at the Boston gig, but when I heard the bootleg recording, I realized how the vocals were nowhere near as dead-on as I remembered.
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Good question, it seems as some of the songs are and some are not. Surrounded seems to be a subpar soundboard recording along with Constant Motion, Dark eternal night and more. The songs recorded in Vancouver BC sound more professional. I'm not positive though..
Well, you're actually right about Surrounded, but wrong about the others. When I interviewed MP back in 2009, I asked him about the credits for Blind Faith and Surrounded, and here's what he said:
Putting together that set, I had based the song picks on the video footage I had. I looked at what was best represented on video and I picked the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. I had my list of all the videos that were being edited for the video and I sent Kevin Shirley the list of what to mix the audio from. And he mixed what we thought was the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. We synced it back up to the video, only to find out that it was from a completely different show – somebody sent him the wrong tapes, and we couldn’t find the Toronto audio. So the audio for Toronto was missing and here we were with this mixed audio of Blind Faith and Surrounded, and we had no idea what show it was even from. So even to this day, I have no idea of what show those specific performances are from...But we already had the video edited and so it was either cut the songs – which I didn’t want to do for the video – or we just go with the live audio mix for the video and we’ll use these mixes for the CD.
So it seems that for those two songs, you are just getting the soundboard feed for the video, altho the songs on the CDs (that are from some other, as yet still unknown show) are properly mixed like the rest of the songs.
I also have to say, there's an amount of natural "sugarcoating" when you're at the venue. I was at the Boston gig, but when I heard the bootleg recording, I realized how the vocals were nowhere near as dead-on as I remembered.
So true - I've had this happen to my numerous times too. The band puts on a "flawless" performance at the show, and later on when you hear the bootleg of the show, you wonder if it's the same show you witnessed, since it's nowhere near as good as what you saw!
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I also have to say, there's an amount of natural "sugarcoating" when you're at the venue. I was at the Boston gig, but when I heard the bootleg recording, I realized how the vocals were nowhere near as dead-on as I remembered.
So true - I've had this happen to my numerous times too. The band puts on a "flawless" performance at the show, and later on when you hear the bootleg of the show, you wonder if it's the same show you witnessed, since it's nowhere near as good as what you saw!
Same here. I always found that to be an interest aspect of seeing something live as opposed to just hearing it on a recording.
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Yeah, I know about the live sugarcoating! Funnily, though, when I went to listen to my recording of the last show I attended, James's performance was must as good as the sugarcoated perception. So I was either lucky to attend an awesome one or my device is able to capture the coating as well as the cake! :lol
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The post-editing of their live releases also has increased quite a bit over the years. James has always had pitch problems as long as I remember, and they've been correcting those more and more. Sometimes too heavy handed (which DVD was it where you could hear the auto tune?).
But it's not just vocals. Remember the BTFW teaser where they did a close-up on JP with an overdubbed section?
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Yeah, there's a lot of autotuning on BTFW. The bootleg reveals that James definitely had some issues that night (though many of the sections do hold up). In particular, there was a LOT of flatness on Finally Free that got fixed up.
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Setlist scotty, thanks for the info on that interview with portnoy. Intersting!
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I wish it was an official release, but since it was so widely circulated it's probably a pretty good chance that most people here have seen it. The show from Jan 24 1995 in Japan. His vocals were just way off. I'm pretty sure that wasn't too long after his food poison incident.
I have that boot (somewhere) remember watching it a while back. It wasn't un-listenable, but James wasn't great on it either. I would say that Live at Budokan in the worst official release, but, it's still not the worst
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It bothers me to no end that Budokan has a tired and frequently out of tune (or close to that) Labrie, because if his shape was similar to Score or BtFW, it would have been my favourite live release of all time without a single doubt. Everything else is god-tier about that DVD. It is far from the worst vocal performance though and Labrie sounds nice at times, but to me it is the most dissapointing one.
OiaLT is not something I can listen to to be honest. It sounds messy as a whole. CiM is even worse, but probably because of the ridiculous amount of filters. For some reason I really love Scenes though, alltough it is flawed. And I always though LaLP was overrated, aside from a few stellar moments. That terrible compression breathing sound during the acoustic set does not help (I loved this when I saw it in person at the show I attended, so was really dissapointed).
I have no qualms with them patching up some sore spots btw (I prefer it even), but I honestly think BtFW is a very good representation of his current capabilities, he nails most songs in a lot of the recent bootlegs.
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I wish it was an official release, but since it was so widely circulated it's probably a pretty good chance that most people here have seen it. The show from Jan 24 1995 in Japan. His vocals were just way off. I'm pretty sure that wasn't too long after his food poison incident.
I have that boot (somewhere) remember watching it a while back. It wasn't un-listenable, but James wasn't great on it either.
I also have that bootleg and I agree. I'd take it over CIM any day, but James' voice cracks several times and you can tell he was in pain throughout that performance... poor guy!
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I wish it was an official release, but since it was so widely circulated it's probably a pretty good chance that most people here have seen it. The show from Jan 24 1995 in Japan. His vocals were just way off. I'm pretty sure that wasn't too long after his food poison incident.
I have that boot (somewhere) remember watching it a while back. It wasn't un-listenable, but James wasn't great on it either.
I also have that bootleg and I agree. I'd take it over CIM any day, but James' voice cracks several times and you can tell he was in pain throughout that performance... poor guy!
Yeah, I feel sorry for him every time I watch something from '95. :-[