Monday, January 4, 2010

Good Grief....

I don't know why, but it seems Celtic Woman fans whip themselves into a frenzy in a short period of time, as I've shown earlier. Now they're ardently denying that the show's latest creation "Songs from the Heart" isn't lip-synched. Look at the link for how they react. Note, the person isn't saying things like "Celtic Woman sucks" but is just saying "they don't sing live." (I also make a few postings here as Lunescent2007).


I've known that CW's shows have been lip-synched for some time now. When I first saw "A New Journey" on PBS in 2006, I didn't think they were, though my mother, who's unfamiliar with the group, said they were. I wasn't really convinced until I saw the "Christmas Celebration" DVD, where it sounds almost identical to a studio recording except a few little extras were added to make it seem live. After that, I've been convinced that they don't sing live, but that doesn't stop me from listening to them or watching their videos. It does bother me a bit that they don't show off their natural voices during concerts, but that's beside the point.

The point is, they do lip-synch. The voices sound identical to a studio recording and ultimately, that is what defines the matter. If you want to hear the girls' real voices (granted, the quality is bad, but this is probably as close to their real voices as we'll hear), check out the following links.




In the meantime, people don't need to leap all over each other just because someone says "oh, they don't sing live." All I can say is, good grief.

4 comments:

  1. The problem with these people is they don't know the difference between flat out lip-synching and a dubbed DVD granted Songs from the Heart was dubbed at the end of "You'll Be In My Heart" when Alex sings the last note it gives off an unnatural echo something you usually here on CDS. Now if the singers at the show are actually singing or are lip-synching I have no clue, in the first two DVDs (later two definitely not) I could definitely say that at least some of the songs were live, in a way. The thing these fans don't realize is that if you take two days to film the specials and mix the footage up there is no way they are real live shows, they probably just use sound check audio for the DVD or in recent specials the CDs, and they can't say the CD wasn't recorded before the special because Chloe has confirmed they recorded the CD first. Whew needed to let that out.


    P.S as for live shows I'd say maybe 25% of the show is live, rest lip-synch :(

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  2. If you think about it for the new show, they probably already had half of the new show already recorded before the DVD: O America has already been released as a single, Pie Jesu, The Call, and You Raise Me Up were on their "best of" CD, and then the following were on the recent tour: You'll Be in My Heart, When You Believe, Fields of Gold, Coast of Galicia, Goodnight My Angel, True Colors, Isle of Hope, Danny Boy, Last Rose Fantasia, the encore/ finale, and Carolina Rua (even though it didn't make it on the DVD or CD). I'm a believer that they don't tour live, so to me it makes sense that they could quickly record the rest of the new show then already add what was recorded before the Isle of Hope tour. But that's just me.

    And it's also interesting, I find, that when you splice various videos, cut and paste this here and there (I know somehow how much work that is, having made videos myself), you have the show recorded on two different nights then the DVD, which is made up of videos from several different cameras, flows so perfectly together without one single glitch in the sound. Maybe it's just me, but it's a bit too perfect.

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  3. I guess since Celtic Woman never produces any music videos they make picture perfect concerts instead and they seem to have gotten to the point where they don't even bother to make the audio different from the CD version. I don't own any of their DVDs so I can't say for sure that the earlier dvds weren't lip-synched as well, though I do believe Hayley and Meav's ANJ solos were live (in a sense).

    Now as for lip-synching in concert, I attended one of their Isle of Hope shows last June. At first I thought they might be singing live but by "The Call" I was convinced some of it was lip-synched, after watching some youtube videos of concerts I think all of their group songs were lip-synched and some of the solos songs MIGHT have been live, but you can never really tell even though those songs did sound different than the CD they still could be pre-recorded, and I won't even go into my views on lip-synching at supposedly live concerts.

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  4. If you watch clips on youtube of the first DVD, which I used to own, you can tell they are lip-synching because you see them stumble over words, sing with their mouths barely open, and are just completely out of line with the sound. The second is a bit harder to tell, even though I think if you watch "Beyond the Sea" the voices, particularly for Meav on the harmony, don't go with the music.

    The Isle of Hope is harder to tell because half of the stuff was new, so we had no CD to compare it to. However, when listening to them perform the older stuff, I was more or less convinced it wasn't live, even though I've heard other people say otherwise.

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