Glee is the Answer When Questions Are Wrong: That Glee Thing

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  • Caleb, if there are pops there, well, pops are often evidence of a clumsy editing where the cut and paste did not take place at a zero crossing. So, could be!
  • edited January 2013
    I have been trying some of the same tricks with similar results (though my tools aren't as good for these particular things as @paulrpotts' and @Caleb's, so their processed tracks are more impressive). BTW, "center-canceling" is one of the tricks used by vocal strippers to remove vocals from finished recordings. Some of them let you pan around a little, in case the singer isn't perfectly centered.
  • Hm. Understand that I'm no audio engineer, but I've got a decent ear.

    So I just listend to @paulrpotts' posted mashups, and on the JoCo Karaoke vs Glee track, I'm not in the slightest bit convinced that Glee didn't also use JoCo's backup vocal track, maybe tried to EQ it down a smidge, and overlaid their own backing vocals, primarily the higher-register parts. The bass backing vocal sounds EXACTLY THE SAME to me. I sing bass/baritone, so my ear not only picks up on those registers easily, I can distinguish between different voices singing the same part.

    These are not different voices. They're the same voice. My testimony to that effect wouldn't hold up in court, but I'm as sure of it as I can possibly be. The instrumental evidence is also pretty clear-cut to me, and Paul and @Caleb have done a masterful job of digging through all that.
  • #109 at almost 2am Monday morning
  • I've posted another Buzzfeed article this weekend (which some of you have already seen) covering JoCo's most recent blog post about Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee) and the song's rise in the iTunes charts. I'd just like to make one request that you please share this article as much as possible. The more you share this article, the more buzz it will create on Buzzfeed and hopefully make it to the front page; and then hopefully spread elsewhere and help to push the song even further up the charts. Every little bit helps. Thanks! Go JoCo!

    - Craig
  • edited January 2013
    I can't post anything at the moment (gotta go to work...), but I created a center-canceled glee track, and hard-panned to the right, applied heavy EQ, and slowed it down to between to between 30-70%. Then I overlayed the solo banjo and mandolin tracks, applied the same EQ, and hard-panned left. There can be no doubt (not that there was before). Even at 30% speed, they line up perfectly. Timing, relative volume, etc...

    I can also hear an unquestionable 'click' in the center-cancelled glee track where the start of the quack would be.
  • Currently at #108. And I am not seeing the Glee Cast version in the top 300
  • #84! Also, holy poop, I love you paulrpotts and Caleb.
    I've been following this whole issue since day one and have been replying to comments on the Glee Facebook page for days; though. this makes me realize I should have checked here more often, too.

    Very very interesting results, I am really curious about how things will eventually end up...
  • All right, I have made some new audio clips and written up my results.


    Oh, and I made a little video to try to make the case a little more clearly for people who don't want to play the clips individually over and over.


    Anyhow... have fun.
  • Phenomenal write up, Paul. And great work all around. Hard to argue against those results!
  • edited January 2013
    Hank Green weighed in yesterday.

    Also, someone explain to me how the hell I embed a YouTube-video in a comment over here.
  • Well done, Paul!

    Well done, Caleb!
  • @skyen: It took me ages to figure out too, but the trick is to simply put the URL in the comment, no linking or anything special.

    I love how you guys managed to figure this out. Coulton fans are indeed different. I also like that this thing has stirred up some non-cruise-related discussion and brought some people back to the forums. I hope you stick around.
  • autojim, if you do the center-cancel trick on Coulton's Karaoke, it preserves his backing vocals. I think that Glee did some copy-paste to get rid of the "little middle" choruses but kept his "yeahs." I hear them in the center-cancelled Glee track -- yes, I believe they used some of his backing vocals as-is.
  • edited January 2013
    @paulrpotts & @Caleb,  great job! I've added your findings to my Buzzfeed piece. The people must know!

    and @skyen -- what @Angelastic said, and also don't use Google Chrome for this if you are on a Mac. I usually use Chrome for everything except when I post videos to this message board.
  • edited January 2013
    I imagine you folks are way ahead of me, but has anyone alerted Jonathan to the research going on in this thread?

    Edit:  Um, I guess that's a yes.  Hi JoCo, go get 'em!
  • You guys are amazing. Things are going to get REAL interesting.
  • @Jmonkee: I believe the answer is "yes". :)

    @paulrpotts: I don't have the tools to do that myself, so I'll take your word for it -- I just know what I heard from the audio of your work sounds like the bass/baritone backing vocals are identical-to-the-point-of-being-the-same-singer between JoCo's and Glee's tracks, which of course points to Glee using JoCo's, as you said. I could hear some of the edits you mention, too. Choppy-sloppy.
  • I'm still working on a timing-based analysis that will reinforce the results that others are getting via center-canceling, etc. I think that this, together with their work, would convince any jury.
  • edited January 2013
    I would love it if someone... that is, someone _else_... could figure out exactly where they did cuts-and-pastes. It seems like a pretty exacting job, but I believe it could be done. However, I'm tired! It's been a lot of late night/early morning hours writing up what I've got so far. I might be able to jump back into it a bit later.

    Also, well, to be blunt, forensic audio experts, and I don't actually claim to be one, get paid to do this kind of thing, the same way that lawyers do. I'm not saying I should get paid for what I've already done, but I think if I'm going to spend a lot more hours on it, I should get paid. And I think there's more than enough of a case for this to be handed off to someone more expert, an independent paid expert, and by this point a judge should be issuing subpoenas to Glee as part of a "discovery" stage.
  • I agree Paul -- at this point, let the paid professionals get involved. I will try to make one more post tonight with my suuuper-slooo-moooo timing analysis (including the quack and the fret noise), but otherwise I think this is all wrapped up in my book.
  • @paulrpotts @Caleb You guys are incredible!
  • Indeed guys, I do not think you should do any more work for free. We'll get a forensics pro who does this sort of thing for a living to prepare whatever we need to go after them (if we decide to do so), and if you don't mind, I would definitely like to pass along all this excellent work to them. I feel as though I owe you SOMETHING though.

    All of this should be great exposure for you ha ha ha.
  • edited February 2013
    Jonathan, certainly. Happy to help. (I only hope I'm correct and haven't just convinced myself to hear something that isn't there... but that's where getting other people to listen comes in). My blog entries & video on this, please pass them on, the little audio clips too. Whatever will help.

    Getting lots of blog hits! But I turned ads off on that blog. Oh well. You know, I've never been on a cruise before :P

    Or, you know, a t-shirt or two would be just fine...

    (Update: seriously, it would be fun, but no, I cannot actually take a week off to go on a cruise. I have five kids and if I did that my wife would most likely change the locks and put my guitars out in the front yard).

  • I love this thread.

    I see it's at 102. Was it really at 84?
  • I love JoCo's fans.

    Maybe it's at #84 in Germany, where @Spektugalo is. I don't see it in the Swiss iTunes chart.
  • You can absolutely pass it on and use it! Like Paul, I'm just happy to help out.

    A T-shirt or something would be fine. (TBH, I wouldn't be able to make the cruise anyway.)
  • edited January 2013
    @Caleb and @paulrpotts, would you be willing to share some high quality, uncompressed or minimally compressed center-canceled tracks of both versions? They'd help a lot in the timing analysis by removing some of the parts I'm not looking at. (I am focusing on banjo and drums; an employee who is a JoCo fan is helping in between tech support calls.)
  • Cost to make an episode of Glee:  $3.5 million.

    Cost to actually create a fantastic cover song:  Priceless.

  • edited January 2013
    Paul probably has the better version, since he actually bought the glee track. What I'm using was just ripped off YT, and it has all kinds of messy compression. Especially when its slowed down.
  • I have been doing my initial work with a YouTube conversion, and -- yes -- it's a mess.
  • edited January 2013
    Although, from Paul's description, the original mp3 may not be much better.
  • edited January 2013
    Well, a couple things. I don't really want to send around versions of Glee's full track (or JoCo's full track) because of copyright. (Just because it's kind of in dispute doesn't mean I can treat it as if it were public domain or Creative Commons). That's why I used short snippets of both tracks in my analysis, since I'm pretty sure they would fall under the fair use exception to copyright. So, although it pains me to say it, I would suggest buying the Glee track and replicating my results that way. Although I'm not sure if the purchased MP3 is really that much better than an audio capture from YouTube. It doesn't sound that great. It has a really smashed lead vocal and lots of artifacts.

    Yeah, the Glee track is full of compression artifacts. They're particularly bad on the vocals but also the instruments. This fact seems to me like part of the evidence towards the idea that the Glee producers started with a compressed file, which I think was Coulton's MP3 Karaoke track.
  • edited January 2013
    I think one can argue that copying for the purpose of criticism or analysis is fair use.... Also, I don't have a great tool to do center canceling. (When I do Karaoke, I like to do my own arrangements rather than messing with vocal cancellation.) Will have to see if a free tool like Audacity is capable of it. Recommendations of good software for this purpose are most welcome.

    The MP3 artifact that most concerns me is pre-echo, which throws off timings. I want to generate a center-canceled track that's as free of it as possible, so that it's possible to pinpoint attack times as accurately as possible. This is key to a temporal analysis.
  • I've center-cancelled in Audacity before, so it's possible. There isn't a magic 'center cancel' button; you have to do the copy, invert, etc yourself, but it's not really difficult. There's a tutorial on the audacity site, which hopefully changes language depending on your OS/browser language settings -- it comes up in French for me although I clicked on a link to an English article.
  • Quick break from the awesome technical talk, to note that one of the most popular political bloggers, Atrios, wrote about this fiasco yesterday.  The title of the post will tell you he's on Team JoCo.  (Don't worry, it's a political blog but the post I linked to is just JoCo, no politics).

    More positive exposure for Mr. Coulton, to a new audience! 
  • edited January 2013
    I'm sure @JoCo has thought of this already, but I wonder if he's planning on making an official music video to go along with this "new" single.
  • edited January 2013
    Anyone got a choreography class that would like to wipe the floor with Glee's video?

    Instead of a banjo and a Stratocaster (oops, Gibson ES-335, maybe?) (really, Glee? There isn't even any electric guitar in the song) the backing band should be a bass player and a guy holding a laptop with Coulton's audio waveforms visible on the screen...
  • Indeed, it would be fun to do a video that, er, kicked Glee's derrière.
  • edited January 2013
    With people dancing around? And Paul dressed as a lady?

    Edit: I know of a ship where there will be a group of JoCo fans with cameras and some more JoCo fans teaching other JoCo fans to dance in a couple of weeks.
  • Yep I just asked recently if we could reserve Baby Got Back from JoCo Karaoke as an "everyone invited on stage" type of thing.  It could be pretty cool!

    It does not have to be during JoCo Karaoke though...
  • We'd have to think up a nice three-syllable phrase to describe who's 'in trouble', of course.
  • @Angelastic Rupert M's in trouble? It wouldn't be the first time...


  • @Spooner LIKE (oh, oops, this isn't Facebook, is it?)
  • @BrettGlass wrote yesterday, oh so many posts ago:
    BTW, "center-canceling" is one of the tricks used by vocal strippers to remove vocals from finished recordings.
    I just dropped by to say: "Vocal Strippers" is the name of my Amanda Palmer cover band.

    Oh, and great job, @paulrpotts and @Caleb!
  • @Spooner @Angelastic & @paulrpotts - How about, Ryan Murph's in trouble?
  • I was thinking maybe something like 'staff of Glee's in trouble' but that's probably because I'm so used to 'Jonny C's' so I expect it to end in ee's. Also we don't know the name of exactly whose idea it was to use the audio or the arrangement. 
  • I once made a parody by ripping audio from a YouTube video of a commercial and running it through a vocal stripper.  It was a plugin for Sonar and had sliders and such that we could play with until we liked the results. Then, we recorded takes of my singing the parody lyrics (while listening to the original so I could try to stay on key), compressed that back down to MP3, added that back to the video, and then sent that back up to YouTube as the parody.  This was around 7 years ago.

    Obviously, this is a completely useless amateur-audio-engineer story... but hey, it would probably be enough to get me hired at Glee, and it shows how easy it can be.

    Sorry, I'm not going to link my parody video here... if you realllllly want to see/hear it for some reason, you can ask me privately.

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