The Official Book of Souls Tour 2016 Thread (Warning: Spoilers within!)

Because they're mixed so low. It's just like the DT backing tracks. They seem really obvious on videos but when you're actually there it's the last thing you notice.
 

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MrKnickerbocker said:
Yeah, I honestly did not hear them at all in either Vegas or Chicago.
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I was too busy losing my mind over Powerslave to give a shit about what was going on with the backing vocals.
jazz from hell said:
My take on the Powerslave backing vox is:

It's highly improbable that they are single note samples of Bruce's original recordings being played on a keyboard. For various reasons.*
I don't like it either, but I'm pretty sure it's just a track. As @matic22 said, the track either starts at the beginning of the song or gets triggered by whomever when these voices enter.
But EVEN IF these voices were samples played on a keyboard - which they certainly aren't IMO - I would dislike that to almost the same degree.

*Who should be the keyboard tech master in the Maiden camp, that not only sampled every single note off of every single backing voc track (I wonder if these even still exist individually), but also programmed them so that they float organically as you described (Rudess) etc.? This just doesn't sound like Maiden; pragmatically, they would just never do that. What would even be the point, when you can just run a track? Cheating is cheating. AND it just sounds like the unaltered original vocals.
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Is all sampling cheating then? How about the string parts played by Michael Kenney during Blood Brothers? That sound comes from a sample of a real orchestra, is that cheating? Or the choir sounds on SSOASS? Is having an unseen keyboard player altogether cheating? Not rhetorical, I'm curious on how these differ for you.

As for the pragmatic side of things, the easiest way to do it is take the entire backing vocal track and map each chord (not just one vocal at a time) to the preferred key. It doesn't even have to be the correct key, since samplers allow you to keep the original pitch locked regardless of where it's played. Would literally take just a few minutes and all Kenney would have to do is hit the correct keys in time with the band. The more difficult method is taking each individual vocal track sepreately and map it all to the correct keys, which I agree I can't see Maiden doing that much for such a short passage.

That said, this aspect of Maiden's live show has hardly been touched in documentaries and interviews so who knows how involved it is. It's also possible that Michael Kenney puts more work into that sort of thing than he gets credit for.
 
I have no problems whatsoever with the sample vocals for Powerslave just as I have no problem with the pre-recorded laugh at the beginning of the song, or the pre-recorded opening voice to TNOB. I do, however, find it underwhelming when Maiden uses pre-recorded music during the start of a song. For example, Aces High in 2008 and Caught Somewhere In Time in 86-87. The openings to these songs are brilliant. A highlight of this tour was Bruce singing the opening to IESF which I was expecting to be pre-recorded.
 
I think people are getting too butthurt about something that doesn't matter. If they played Alexander the Great and used a recording for Adrian's solo (which he can't remember) I honestly wouldn't care.
 
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Collin said:
I don't think the link on that site is very safe... It made me download MEGAsync, which does nothing and just gained access to my documents.
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When you go to Mega, ignore the thing about Megasync and just select the option to download through your browser and you'll have no problems.
 
Interesting discussion. I'd like to get into this later when I have more time. Let's also take the context of this song into it (concert history, different era's, different "choices" etc.). Also, I'll make a comparison with three other bands (the differences), and then we'll see how Maiden fits in this context.
 
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