[BC] Off-key choir

[Kevin Tekel]

Broadcast list USER wrote:
> I read an article on this a few months ago.  There IS software that  
> can pick music apart and fix ONE thing in it, a vocal, an instrument,  
> whatever.

I've heard that in the late '50s, before the advent of multi-track
recording, in an attempt to fix off-key lead vocals, engineers would
manually adjust the pitch of *the complete mix* to make the lead singer
sound more on-key, at the expense of then disturbing the pitch of all
the musicians and background singers, which was supposedly less
noticeable.

Of course, these are probably the same engineers who gave us the crazy
phasing effect in Miss Toni Fisher's "The Big Hurt" -- the inadvertent
result of attempting to raise the level of her vocals in the complete mix
by overdubbing the song with itself.  Or at least that's the most
believable version of how it came to be; I've heard all sorts of wacky
explanations, such as "the song was recorded over shortwave radio"!