I remember seeing the Himawari Gumi DVD a couple of years ago and while it was enjoyable because the girls changed every day it was the same recording no matter what girls were on stage and I’m like… what’s the point?

BTW when are you in Japan til because I’d love to meet up before you leave.
Also going to the 5ki event in August if you want me to give Gaki anything. She was fabulous in Fashionable.

And yeah, that’s why I made an emphasis on Arashi’s ”tv performances” xD I know they do their concerts live, and even in them they have lipsynched a few songs here and there, but I get your point. And TBH every time I feel like I’m about to flee out of the AKB fandom due to the lipsynching, they always do something, or I find a video, or a show, that reminds me of why I’m a fan xD I got in for the songs, but the actual girls on them, and even more, the bluntness in the way the group is managed hooked me up.

For one thing, if the girls are dancing around a lot, you can hear them getting out of breath or even breathing in the microphone during live performances. If a girl, for example, jumps during a line and her voice remains perfectly even, it’s lipsync. Also, if it’s totally perfect, it’s lipsync. If their mouth movements are just a bit off from what you hear, it’s lipsync. If you are familiar with the recorded version and every nuance is exactly the same, lipsync. That’s the easiest way to tell. The same lines being sung by the same girl won’t sound exactly the same every time. But if she makes a mistake or forgets a line, or even substitutes something else for the line (for example, Risa singing “Happy happy happy birthday” instead of “happy happy happy has come” during Reina’s birthday show.

But yeah, really it just sounds different. It’s really obvious when some girls are singing live and some aren’t. It’s harder to tell during big group parts, because that has a homogenizing effect, but if there are solo or small group lines it’s easy to tell.

And maybe life performances just means that fans can observe their idols in the flesh …

Studio execs. “Hey! That performance didn’t sound 100% perfect! We must hide this shameful lack of perfection from people who buy the concert DVD!”

Dude. We don’t care. Honest.

Arashi huh? Well, at least their concerts and concert DVDs are live.

Now, AKB is a musical group, and they sound great live (mostly due to shared lines, but no, they do have good voices to start with). The problem is that, weirdly, Japan is very permissive with that. For example, I haven’t heard a single live tv performance of Arashi this year, and from what I read, their fans have the same class of discussions as we do xD But they also say, Arashi gets paid for singing and dancing, and so does AKB, so it’s kinda disrespectful to the audience that they don’t sing live when they can. I don’t get it.

Now, about AKB’s live concerts, when you said that
”I’ve never seen anything so drastic as patching in a different recording of the vocals.”

Ahhhh, whenever I write about this, I feel like I’m giving a very lame excuse xD, but that’s exactly what happens with all AKB’s DVD concerts since their first one. I say it’s a lame excuse because seriously, no one bothers to paste recorded stuff over a live concert, and because I don’t have the video with the exact part when the camera shows the stage and you hear they are actually singing live D: but yes, that’s what happened, while watching their making ofs and it struck me right away, when the camera goes from the backstage to the audience and the stage, they were singing live. They aren’t professional singers, and I’ve heard their songs enough times to know when they lipsynch and they don’t.

In case you don’t believe me (and I don’t blame you xD), the best example happened during their 100 song concert in 2009. I guess you watched it already, the making of is full of bits of live performances. But, when the #1 song, ”Shonichi” is announced, and the Team B girls come crying into the stage, they start performing the song, and I thought they were lipsynching, but when the making shows that part, they are bawling, they sound terrible, yet they are singing their hearts out, full of gratitude to the fans. It’s a shame they fixed the sound because it killed the whole emotion of the performance, and I wish they stop doing it. I also have the feeling that Takamina’s ”Bird” was live, I mean, she was about to cry, too.

Of course, songs without stage recordings end up live, like all their shuffle units, but it’s not enough. I hope they stop doing it, because….it doesn’t make sense. The DVDs are very limited to get, so not many people will watch the performances anyway, and the ones that were there heard them live, so…wtf???

I’ll start with saying that I prefer live singing- even if it’s not perfect, _because_ it is not perfect. There is a certain personality that comes through in live recordings that is not present in studio recordings- where the same line is often sung dozens of times and then “frankenstein-ed” together. I love that you included that performance of “BYE BYE Matane,” to illustrate the point. Can you imagine that moment with canned vocals? This isn’t to say that I like listening to god-awful vocals- I just like to hear my performers “caught in the moment.”

But with all the talk of DVD recordings and comparisons, I think we should remember that ALL of these performances are mixed and edited and (possibly) re-recorded. I’m not saying the entire performance is re-recorded, but we should be occasionally suspicious. To bring up a couple of examples think of how David Bowie added background vocal tracks to his “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” concert movie or Kiss Alive! being “as live as it needs to be!” I have the distinct feeling that most of the concert footage we are watching is in this strange not-quite-live domain.