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I have always loved Karen’s singing on her duet with Georgia Engel of stille nacht, on their 1978 Christmas tv special. Does anyone here know if Karen vocal was recorded together with Georgia’s or separately? Just hoping that one day we may be able to hear a clean version of it.
I have always loved Karen’s singing on her duet with Georgia Engel of stille nacht, on their 1978 Christmas tv special.
I’ve always thought the vocal blend of Karen and Georgia was, well, awful. They don’t sound good together. Karen does her best singing the (lower) harmony to Georgia’s awful lead vocal but it’s not enough to rescue it. I’ve just relistened to it now and my opinion hasn’t changed one bit since I first heard it.
Hi Chris, thank you for your reply. Do you know if the pre recording in the stupio had their voices recorded together or separately? Agree that the duet doesn’t work.They were pre-recorded in the studio and both were lip-syncing for the performance.
If it was pre-recorded their voices were probably recorded to seperate tracks and then mixed for mono.Hi Chris, thank you for your reply. Do you know if the pre recording in the stupio had their voices recorded together or separately? Agree that the duet doesn’t work.
If it was pre-recorded their voices were probably recorded to seperate tracks and then mixed for mono.
That is getting quite technical for me . I will try to listen for this next time. I still really like Karen’s singing on it and hope to hear it one day on a box set. Along with some of the still unreleased snippets of singing from make your own kind of music.I think part of it has to do with the way it's keyed, and for reasons you mention about the differences in their vocal abilities. Not great for live performance but I think for television - at least back then, it's forgivable. Karen is also vacillating between a tenor and alto part, so it lacks the anticipatory ease that would come with just a straight tenor line.
That is getting quite technical for me . I will try to listen for this next time. I still really like Karen’s singing on it and hope to hear it one day on a box set. Along with some of the still unreleased snippets of singing from make your own kind of music.
I see . Thank you !What Chris is saying is Karen isn’t singing the main melody of the song, the way she does on the album. So if you played her vocal on it’s own, it would sound odd as she’s singing only harmony parts.
Karen is singing a "lead" vocal throughout the song. She is not simply singing "harmony parts."
If Karen's vocal was recorded on a separate track, then it's true you would have a complete vocal which could be used, perhaps pairing her up with a better vocalist to sing the other part, and redoing the backing track more fully. Whether it would be worth going to all that expense for a duet that few people would be interested in hearing, is another matter altogether.
Does anyone know why the short versions of “a house is not a house”; “wishin hoping”;“I wannna be free” etc have not been released to date? Are they just too short?
There’s still “Toyland” that Richard performed himself and didn’t include, even though I think Karen probably would have pushed for.I have a feeling that if it were possible, Richard would have recorded a lead himself and replaced Georgia Engel's part for inclusion on An Old-Fashioned Christmas.