"These Are Special Times" album - Official Topic

[ryba]

No, the performance was yesterday in

the ZDf-Show "Ein Herz für Kinder".

so they sang together again?

[comingback]

so they sang together again?

 

YEP

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFf5gUtCDo

[ryba]

YEP

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFf5gUtCDo

cool! Thanks for sharing!

[PuraVida]

 

 

Guilty of what?

 

 

Copying The Style of an original song she covered...IYAMT, Summertime, come to mind first

[jpatdeleon09]

 

 

 

Copying The Style of an original song she covered...IYAMT, Summertime, come to mind first

 

So the O Holy Night version of Céline is not her own style?

[PuraVida]

So the O Holy Night version of Céline is not her own style?

 

I said Celine is guilty of copying in the past, didn't say with that particular song. I don't know if Celine modeled her version off of another version.

[PuraVida]

YEP

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFf5gUtCDo

 

Wow. We need to talk about who did The Prayer as good as Celine....and this is one of the best versions I've heard besides Celine!!!

[jpatdeleon09]

 

 

I said Celine is guilty of copying in the past, didn't say with that particular song. I don't know if Celine modeled her version off of another version.

 

Oh I thought you’re talking about that song.. Anyways..

 

Céline’s version is still the best one for me and the appropriate one

[PuraVida]

 

 

Oh I thought you’re talking about that song.. Anyways..

 

Céline’s version is still the best one for me and the appropriate one

 

Carrie can’t touch Celine, but she’s a good vocalist

[rfkavanagh]

I love a good belter so I think Carrie's great overall, but where she falls down a little is in her ability to explore vocal shading and emotion - she tends to go full bore on everything and beat the notes into submission. Her voice is incredible, but a little more nuance in interpretation would benefit her greatly in the long run. She's more than capable of it and that's reflected in some of her other songs, but her natural tendency is to show off the power of her voice with full force. Her O Holy Night is full power, all the time, whereas Céline modulates her performance throughout to provide light and shade, softness and power where needed.

 

On another note, Carrie's albums are travesties of loudness and minimal dynamic range. Nothing to do with the songs themselves, but the mastering is horrendous and tends to make them quite fatiguing listens. Then again, LMBTL and Courage are not exactly bastions of DR, either.

[PuraVida]

I love a good belter so I think Carrie's great overall, but where she falls down a little is in her ability to explore vocal shading and emotion - she tends to go full bore on everything and beat the notes into submission. Her voice is incredible, but a little more nuance in interpretation would benefit her greatly in the long run. She's more than capable of it and that's reflected in some of her other songs, but her natural tendency is to show off the power of her voice with full force. Her O Holy Night is full power, all the time, whereas Céline modulates her performance throughout to provide light and shade, softness and power where needed.

 

On another note, Carrie's albums are travesties of loudness and minimal dynamic range. Nothing to do with the songs themselves, but the mastering is horrendous and tends to make them quite fatiguing listens. Then again, LMBTL and Courage are not exactly bastions of DR, either.

 

Well-said and observed. She never surprises

 

What does DR mean

Edited December 6, 2020 at 07:49 PM by PuraVida

[smw]

I’ve always appreciated — especially during her prime — how Celine could belt / show off her tremendous, untouchable power but she could also sound so fluid, soft, and gentle. She really does showcase a wide variety of ability & convey so much emotion with that perfectly gorgeous tone (like in the opening lines of J’attendais or FIY etc etc). Celine is truly special. It reminds me of this video:

 

 

She’s understood the power of restraint / conveying emotion since the beginning of her recording career. Just listen to her early French albums. Her voice is already so beautiful.

[rfkavanagh]

Well-said and observed. She never surprises

 

What does DR mean

 

DR = dynamic range. Not sure if it was just the initialism itself or if you were curious about what dynamic range is, but essentially it's the distance between the loudest and the quietest sound in a particular source.

 

If you've ever heard of the loudness wars with albums over the past 25 years or so, that's about mastering practices severely curtailing natural dynamic range to make songs sound "punchier" - it means even the quietest passages have their volume artificially bumped up relative to the naturally loud passages so that everything is set at essentially the same level. It's very tiring on human ears - it's like having someone screaming in your ear at the same volume non-stop instead of letting natural volume modulations provide a more balanced experience, and it usually results in clipping or brickwalling, which not only curtails but eliminates some of the sounds, often resulting in distortion. It's kind of fascinating and horrifying when you realize what's been done to contemporary music. Sadly, most remasters of classic albums are far worse than the originals because the contemporary approach is to master for loudness.

 

Don't even get me started on streaming...

[Chantemoi]

 

 

DR = dynamic range. Not sure if it was just the initialism itself or if you were curious about what dynamic range is, but essentially it's the distance between the loudest and the quietest sound in a particular source.

 

If you've ever heard of the loudness wars with albums over the past 25 years or so, that's about mastering practices severely curtailing natural dynamic range to make songs sound "punchier" - it means even the quietest passages have their volume artificially bumped up relative to the naturally loud passages so that everything is set at essentially the same level. It's very tiring on human ears - it's like having someone screaming in your ear at the same volume non-stop instead of letting natural volume modulations provide a more balanced experience, and it usually results in clipping or brickwalling, which not only curtails but eliminates some of the sounds, often resulting in distortion. It's kind of fascinating and horrifying when you realize what's been done to contemporary music. Sadly, most remasters of classic albums are far worse than the originals because the contemporary approach is to master for loudness.

 

Don't even get me started on streaming...

 

That’s fascinating. Why this trend? The Courage album definitely sounds...strange to my ears. Like the vocals have been distorted on most of the songs. One of the major strengths of Céline’s music in the 90s was her mastery of volume control, like the way she’d go from a soft whisper to a power belt in 2 seconds flat. You just don’t hear that anymore. I wondered if that was just her voice changing?

 

Also, I agree about Carrie’s version of “O Holy Night”. It’s sounds so laboured and amateur in a way. I’ve never followed her before, so I don’t know what she sounds like normally, but that performance did not impress me. Her voice is strong, but it’s grating on my ears to hear her sing the full song.

[Bruno Portugal]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CIgKrNZhTOq/?igshid=fhsxpaoti6nw

 

Nice review.

[Xpresso]

https://www.instagra...id=fhsxpaoti6nw

 

Nice review.

Nice! We need more of those.

[emi&celine]

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[rfkavanagh]

That's fascinating. Why this trend? The Courage album definitely sounds...strange to my ears. Like the vocals have been distorted on most of the songs. One of the major strengths of Céline's music in the 90s was her mastery of volume control, like the way she'd go from a soft whisper to a power belt in 2 seconds flat. You just don't hear that anymore. I wondered if that was just her voice changing?

 

It's tough to know in the case of Courage whether it's truly a mastering issue or simply that the loudness is baked into the mix so that no amount of remastering would "solve" the problem. Contemporary production techniques often result in lower dynamics anyway, and a degree of distortion is sometimes appealing to producers. Vinyl should receive its own unique mastering to better match the capabilities of the format, which is why you may often find that a vinyl edition of an album is more dynamic and pleasing to the ear, but at the same time so many studios basically just use the same digital files and throw them on the vinyl release with no bespoke adjustments, so you don't get any of the theoretical advantages that vinyl can provide.

 

The whole loudness thing initially started due to a belief that it was a way to stand out on radio - by punching everything up to the max, it ensured that your song broke through on broadcast, sounded "better" than the other competitive songs surrounding it, and avoided lulls and quiet passages that allowed anyone's attention to veer away from the song. Of course, then everyone started doing it, and suddenly you had a never-ending parade of songs screaming at you across the airwaves. It's continued to this day, and the irony now is that with level-matching in effect across all streaming services, songs actually sound better with more dynamic range. When you submit a brickwalled track to a streaming service, its volume will be matched to all other tracks, and because its dynamics have already been limited by loud mastering, it ends up sounding wimpier and squashed compared to other tracks. The sad thing is that most listeners these days don't really notice or pay attention - partly because they're so often listening on their phones or sub-standard bluetooth speakers, etc., and partly because human bias means "loud" music can initially sound "better" but misses out on most of the nuances of the performances - and then people wonder why they have a headache. Even a lot of artists don't understand the issue and push their mastering engineers to master louder, thinking that it sounds "bigger" and has more impact. Oasis was a big culprit for this - they pushed the loudness on What's The Story, Morning Glory so far and set everyone thinking that was the new thing to do to compete, and so starting around 1995 or so, you start to see CDs getting louder and louder, with dynamics getting more and more compromised. There's been a little turnaround of late, but the ship has definitely sailed.

[rfkavanagh]

P.S., Regarding Céline's "soft whisper to a power belt" shift, on the one hand I think much of that has to do with her changing voice and evolving song styles, so she doesn't do it as much anymore. But on the other hand, even if she did it, the impact would be minimized through loud mastering.

 

As a simple example, imagine if she did it and you graded each section on a 10-point volume scale. Naturally, the soft whisper might be a 2, and then she cycles up to her power belt at a 10. Loud mastering would take that 2 and artificially increase the volume up to say a 7. What started out as an 8-point swing in volume is now only a 3-point swing. The soft whisper is still the same note, still delivered softly, but figuratively speaking, it's now yelling at you. Your ears are hearing it at a much higher volume than it should be, and there's no longer much of a volume difference between the soft whisper and the power belt.

 

That's loud mastering in effect.

[jpatdeleon09]

Reaction Time

 

 

Edited December 9, 2020 at 08:00 AM by jpatdeleon09

[jpatdeleon09]

More reaction

 

[comingback]

AIWFCIY is No 2 and MC is No 15 in the Billboard Charts, TAST is nowhere. Edited December 9, 2020 at 01:49 PM by comingback

[jpatdeleon09]

AIWFCIY is No 2 and MC is No 15 in the Billboard Charts, TAST is nowhere.

 

No doubt, she’s always in the top charts when it’s christmas time. Thanks to AIWFCIY

 

after that she will sleep again and wait for another christmas

[Xpresso]

Her Xmas special probably helped to go up the charts too.

[PuraVida]

One of her greatest vocals is on her Xmas album!

 

[marc-02]

[stevo]

Oh watching that footage of her in the studio, it makes me sooo sad that this was just forgotten and the album not pushed or celebrated. It’s a gem

[yoyoma]

I have yo say r.kelly has ruined it big time. It used to be doing really well until r.kelly scandal broke. Otherwise, i am your angel will earn good stream. Big middle finger to r.kelly

[Bruno Portugal]

One of her greatest vocals is on her Xmas album!

 

 

One of my favorites from the album. This could be a hit single!

[manu23]

Mariah's album benefits a lot from streaming, when it comes to actual copies sold both albums are hand on hand but then AIWFCIY streams come in and push the album's total.

 

I can't believe they are not promoting TAST more the last few years! It upsets me even more than the poor promo for Courage. It was always selling more than MC every year until recently.