Altering the pitch is a technique, not a cheat. They manipulated it to make it sound that way.īut that’s no reason to get angry. No, the singer’s voice isn’t really that low.
Remember that “la-la-la-la” song “Breaking Me” from a couple years back, sung by Sweden’s A7S?
We wanted to mention that sort of thing too, because that’s how songs change their pitch nowadays. With this recording, he actually raised the pitch through techniques other than raising the track’s speed. He rapped both parts of “I Got a Man,” raising the pitch in the studio on half the lines to make those lines sound like a woman’s singing them. So, who’s this mystery woman, uncredited on “I Got a Man” despite singing half of it? Is it MC Lyte, like in the last rap duet Positive K released about him failing to pick up a woman? It wasn’t unheard of in the 1990s to have different women from the actual singer lip sync the words in a rap video (think to those actresses instead of SWV doing the chorus in the video of “Men in Black”). However, it’s just one female voice, so just one female singer must be behind the vocals. He sang into a variable-speed tape recorder that he bought personally, for $2,000 in today’s money. To make chipmunk voices, however - and to make them sing at what sounds like a normal speed - creator Ross Bagdasarian had to sing really slowly using his normal voice. With most of these examples, the released audio is only slightly higher than the sung audio, so the necessary difference in speed is small. But consider how difficult this made the original performance. Of course, if you know that sped-up recordings sound high, you know that’s how the Chipmunks originally got their voices. That’s still very young by most standards and especially by McCartney standards.Īs he got older (and as he sang the song to older people), McCartney considered changing the words to “ When I’m 84.” Today, even that title doesn’t promise a very lasting romance, as McCartney turns 81 later this year. The silly thing is, McCartney wasn’t exactly geriatric when he first recorded those vocals. They sped it up for the released version, for a very specific reason: to make McCartney sound younger, to suit the themes of the song. That voice there sounds higher than McCartney’s usual one.
When this proved too artificial, Gregory suggested playing the whole thing at a lower key that his sax could handle and letting them speed it up in the studio to make it sound right. He’d have to use a technique called alternate fingering to simulate the sounds.
He had the wrong kind of instrument, one incapable of playing the right notes. Then came Steve Gregory, who was surely doomed even more than any of the others. They went through six more saxophonists, who all failed. Still, the guy couldn’t get it right, and George’s instructions (“ Twitch upwards there! But not too much”) weren’t especially helpful. Later, they tried again, with another acclaimed saxophonist, this time from New York. But then the time came to record it formally, and they hired some big-time L.A. It worked out all right in the first demo, with some unknown friend of Michael’s just casually blowing it out.
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