only the best will do: close-mic singing

I always get a faint electric shock when I get too close to the mic.

iirc it was frank sinatra who popularized the breathy, close style that had already become a hit with cabarets and nightclub acts

Singers who used the new capabilities of the microphone to sing in a more quiet, intimate voice starting from the 1920s were called "crooners". See the wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooner

Sinatra is often included in that group, but there were earlier examples, including notably Bing Crosby.

From the Bing Crosby entry on Wikipedia:

He was thus able to take popular singing beyond the kind of "belting" associated with a performer like Ali Schuette, who had to reach the back seats in New York theatres without the aid of the microphone. With Crosby, as Henry Pleasants noted in The Great American Popular Singers, something new had entered American music, something that might be called "singing in American," with conversational ease. The oddity of this new sound led to the epithet "crooner."

good thread

ah it was bing

all bing'd out and shit

just to be clear the track i am referring to is "wait" by the ying yang twins

What about close mic singing? Ask Leslie Harvey.

i dunno bout sinatra or whatevs, but i'm a big fan of close-mic singing. i dunno, it sounds good to me. it's tough thinking of music i love that isn't close mic? except for like my grunge girls, who kind of belt it.

but the pop stuff i like is definitely close mic. also, when it comes to making music, i often find it just so easy + efficient to do the breathy mic thing.

http://images.musicclub.it/foto/ge/big/GENESIS_P_ORRIDGE.tif.big.jpg

could have sworn xgau wrote something longform about bing crosby, but this is all i can find:

BING CROSBY: The Best of Bing Crosby: 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection (MCA) Crosby perfected modern microphone technique and pioneered the musical use of magnetic tape. He was hip to the jive at a time when declaring yourself a Rhythm Boy was rebellion aplenty. But it's hard to hear these innovations in his countless records, partly because they've been superseded, partly because the essence of his art was an illusion of naturalness that fails if people notice it. So I've never found a record of his to get with until this 12-track cheapo, which features another Crosby--the one some count the most popular recording artist of the 20th century. The only title under-30s know here is "White Christmas." But for a child of the prerock era like me, these songs are pop music--not the well-bred harmonic pretensions pumped by Alec Wilder, but the Tin Pan Alley whose model is the Irving Berlin of "Play a Simple Melody." This was easy, sentimental music; my family sang "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" at parties, and I knew the words to "Swinging on a Star" by age four. But if to me it sounds like a social fact, to someone younger it's the indelible trace of a culture now lost. And it's Crosby who transforms it into a given. A

tracer the aretha >> american idol continuum is a huge complicator in the story you've laid out

Is this like in 'close to me' where you can hear Robert breathing into the mic? god I love that song.

One thing that bugs me about some 21st-century r&b is that it'll try to use close micing to approximate singing styles that should have a bit more power, which is just ... off, somehow. Except when it's Nivea, then I don't mind.

I mean, you get this voice that's the equivalent of someone who's listening to a normal r&b singer on headphones, on the subway, and kind of singing along quietly under her breath without realizing it.

breathy undersinging is ok by me. merciless multitracked self-commentary, mixing loud voices quieter than softer ones, different reverb regimes every couple seconds, i love it!

the pop/r&b vocal tic that really gets on my tits is the guttural grindy throaty thing that singers do on an initial vowel, like "xxxIIII wanna know xxxxiiifff you etc etc." it's just a constant part of the repertoire now and it's lame.

er what i'm trying to say isn't only the obvious robots good naturalism bad thing, but that specifically i like hearing voices 'placed' in the mix where they couldn't be in relation to other voices on the track. quiet shouts, booming little cries, etc.

except the whisper song! whispering is all raspy high frequencies and through your car stereo that shit is just grating

The whispery, close-mic thing can definitely be overdone. Exhibit A: the Charlotte Gainsbourg version of "Just Like A Woman" on the "I'm Not There" soundtrack.

Part of the problem is advances in microphone design though. If you're using a cardioid or hyper-cardioid mic (which is generally the case these days, particularly live) and you back off from the mic, you lose most of the body/warmth/low end of your voice (called the proximity effect), and/or vanish entirely. As a result, most vocalists are trained by live performance not to use the mic the way an earlier performer would, by varying volume and distance for effect.

Sorry, back to audio-geek corner for me.

I recall walking into a subway station in NYC a few years ago and seeing a small funk-or-something combo playing (electric guitar, drums, electric bass, lead and backup vocals) and only the drums and vocals were unamplified. And the mix was perfect, and I was kind of stunned as I couldn't imagine any of the bands I normally listen to pulling this off. It sounded pretty great.

I do wish rock had more Tim Rose-type "I'm a man and I can belt it out when need be" singers nowadays. Maybe it does and I'm just not hearing them.

john that's interesting, i never knew that

mics freak me out i never know if i'm about to break mine...

I couldn't find a good pic of Roger Daltrey swinging a mic around so you'll have to imagine it...

The ones that spring to mind immediately, even though I have no evidence, are Bonnie Prince Billy and Nick Drake.

Honourable mention for It's a Fine Day by Jane and Barton

Surmounter, it's really really hard to break a standard dynamic (ie not condensor) mic, barring the aforementioned Daltrey routine.