Now And Then (merged threads)

[Rupert Pupkin]

Did you share an instrumental version of "Now And Then" by the way ? I'm afraid I missed it.

I remember - I have it somewhere on my hard disk but I can't find it, perhaps there are still there on a thread ? 2 tweets by Sean Lennon (last summer) about "Now And Then" clarifying that the A.I was used only to "learn" John's voice in order to separate John's voice and the piano.
And that in no A.I model will be used on John's voice; no alteration at all.
That's not his exact words, but it's not like this youtube where he played "autotune" with John's "Hold On" from Plastic Ono Band saying that his father would have loved it. Well, I'm sure that John would have double-tracked his voice (had he recorded in studio Now And Then) like the Double Fantasy material but wouldn't have experiment like on "Tomorrow Never Knows" with his voice; although he put some flanger at the very end of Just Like Starting Over (still a nice effect IMHO)



When I saw this video I was kind of afraid . Perhaps this explain why some people were angry and express their fear and Sean had to tweet about this.

My guess is that : perhaps a better gen tape of "Now And Then" was found (although it's exactly the same take that the one we know); but you can't hear that contrary to "Real Love" they did not keep John's piano (they could have keep it in the background of the mix); that makes me think that the quality was probably not a huge gap with the His Master's Choice's transfer we have.

But using A.I audio extraction with a voice-learning has certainly helped to get a much more "natural" and complete "extraction" (strange words for a song) of John's voice.
But certainly there are A.I software here for us and we could to the same clean voice extraction (when I listen to Dae Lims imaginary songs from the Beach Boys, I think that we are good with A.I softwares).

[Lord Reith]

Bloody hell, if I were Sean that is something I would be desperate to keep secret. fancy tweeting it.

There is no such thing as Autotune that can't be heard... only people whose hearing isn't good enough to notice it. The autotune on Now And then is awful. It is the only thing about the record that makes me cringe. If they'd left it alone, it would have been perfect.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Bloody hell, if I were Sean that is something I would be desperate to keep secret. fancy tweeting it.

There is no such thing as Autotune that can't be heard... only people whose hearing isn't good enough to notice it. The autotune on Now And then is awful. It is the only thing about the record that makes me cringe. If they'd left it alone, it would have been perfect.

I was posting the excerpt of applying auto-tune on "Hold On"; and at that time I was afraid that John's voice would got the same treatment on Now And Then; that's perhaps why Sean tweeted about the use of AI on John's voice last summer.
There is fortunately no use of autotune on "Now And Then" for John's voice. Had Lennon recorded in studio this track he would have recorded it using double-tracked vocals because he wasn't satisfied with his voice.

if to extract John's voice they do some A.I "learn" using several Dakota demos (where John sings the same way than on Now And Then) in order to get the best voice extraction that's a good approach and use of this new technique. The terrible thing would have been to create a John studio-Dakota era A.I models to enhance his vocals which is fortunately not the case. They stopped at the right "ethic" barrier.
That said, it's not John's voice in studio as we would have heard it if he had the chance to record it in 1980. John didn't sing in the Dakota playing his upright piano like in studio during the Double Fantasy session. And it's not a matter of his voice aging; he had a terrible insecure voice during the fall 1970 piano demo sessions when he started to rework Child Of Nature on piano; soon to be Jealous Guy.
Any idea why John did not sing on at home like he do in studio ? To shy (even being alone (such a paradox if this would be the case) ? a different voice while composing songs ? I even have the feeling that quite the opposite : being alone, John allowed himself to open it more : for instance remember the acoustic demo of "If I Fell" : the voice is so fragile, out of tune, it's almost a Plastic Ono Band "spirit" cry 5 years before 1970. Whilst the Beatles studio version is hiding behind this studio arrangement, tempo, vocal harmonies (who said "Crippled Inside" ?)
I ask this because the rudimentary equipment does not explain why John's voice is like this; I don't think he wanted to preserve his voice; it's really odd.
I have listened several other demos by other artists, the difference between studio voice and their home demos is not that radical.
See (hear), the Walls & Bridges rehearsals on Menlove Ave. (release in their entirety by Vigotone, then His Master's Choice). He has such a great voice as if this was another Plastic Ono Band album but with a jazzy vibe.

Here are the 2 tweets by Sean (I just wonder if they have some A.I tools more sophisticated than the one we can used so that we could have the same clean vocal separation + the piano isolated; I think that if they did not use the piano like they do for "Real Love" it was because the sound was as "dirty" as the demo we have from His Master's Choice (less buzz than the Pegboy release) - I don't think that they found a better home tape. And I wonder why no other takes of "Now And Then" haven't surfaced; the song is too evolved to have been recorded by John at home on piano on 1 single take. Remember all the piano takes of Real Love or Free As A Bird. She's A Friend Of Dorothy has several takes (only take 2 and 7 surfaced) :

[Choking Smoker]

Bloody hell, if I were Sean that is something I would be desperate to keep secret. fancy tweeting it.

There is no such thing as Autotune that can't be heard... only people whose hearing isn't good enough to notice it. The autotune on Now And then is awful. It is the only thing about the record that makes me cringe. If they'd left it alone, it would have been perfect.

That said, it's not John's voice in studio as we would have heard it if he had the chance to record it in 1980. John didn't sing in the Dakota playing his upright piano like in studio during the Double Fantasy session. And it's not a matter of his voice aging; he had a terrible insecure voice during the fall 1970 piano demo sessions when he started to rework Child Of Nature on piano; soon to be Jealous Guy.
Any idea why John did not sing on at home like he do in studio ? To shy (even being alone (such a paradox if this would be the case) ? a different voice while composing songs ? I even have the feeling that quite the opposite : being alone, John allowed himself to open it more : for instance remember the acoustic demo of "If I Fell" : the voice is so fragile, out of tune, it's almost a Plastic Ono Band "spirit" cry 5 years before 1970. Whilst the Beatles studio version is hiding behind this studio arrangement, tempo, vocal harmonies (who said "Crippled Inside" ?)
I ask this because the rudimentary equipment does not explain why John's voice is like this; I don't think he wanted to preserve his voice; it's really odd.
I have listened several other demos by other artists, the difference between studio voice and their home demos is not that radical.
See (hear), the Walls & Bridges rehearsals on Menlove Ave. (release in their entirety by Vigotone, then His Master's Choice). He has such a great voice as if this was another Plastic Ono Band album but with a jazzy vibe.

I love your point about John changing his voice, to me it was like he wouldn't allow himself to go back in time. Of the snippets we have of John covering tracks from the Beatle days can anybody think of a single one where he tried to sound like he did on the original recording?

[Rupert Pupkin]

I guess that the Kinfaus demos are the closest thing to the White Album - all the acoustic songs which turned out to be acoustic songs in studio (like Julia, Dear Prudence, etc...) are closed to the White Album studio. "Julia" like "Look at Me" are sounding like the demo.
But I have to add that The White Album is IMHO the first album where John allows him to push his vocals into a chameleon-voice-higher-pitched direction (not totally falsetto like later "One Day At A Time" on Mind Games (the spoken voice prior to Yoko's suggestions are way better) : but Julia, I'm So Tired and especially Sexy Sadie (which announced David Bowie's Lady Stardust) are the songs I have in mind. Before, we had "A Day In The Life" and "Baby You're A Rich Man".
I think that if we had a demo of A Day In The Life or Across The Universe, it would be close to the studio version rendition (just a guess).

But I would say that these White Album demos were "polished", double-tracked; so perhaps John was thinking twice.
But the Dakota demos were often double-tracked with or without rhythm drums box with vocal overdubs : Grow Old With Me, etc...
So the recording of this Dakota-demos was not a "one shot" recording; John polished the recording of his demos, but his voice was different.
Perhaps he put everything in his voice to set the "stripped-down", crude, song- like an "open heart", whereas in studio, strings arrangement, moaning guitar would take place and rebalance the voice vulnerability ("I'm Losing You" for instance).

All the other demos which comes to my mind are showing a much more POB "stripped-down" fragility : his revisitation of "Help!" in 1970 (can't reach the chorus before he struggle with the chords he can transpose on piano), "If I Fell", the bridge of "I'm In Love" piano demo...

[Lord Reith]

No there's definitely autotune on John's voice on Now And Then. My overiding impression when his voice came in was the autotune. Having remixed it myself some 18 months earlier I was very familiar with how it really sounded.

It's not severe, but it's most certainly there. Nobody actually sings like that.

[Rupert Pupkin]

No there's definitely autotune on John's voice on Now And Then. My overiding impression when his voice came in was the autotune. Having remixed it myself some 18 months earlier I was very familiar with how it really sounded.

It's not severe, but it's most certainly there. Nobody actually sings like that.

yeah I know what you mean now; from time to time John's voice is trembling on the original demo (and it is his voice, not the tape), they probably used auto-tune to "stabilize" his voice.

So the video on youtube with Sean Lennon applying auto-tune on "Hold On"' from Plastic Ono Band was the announcement of what would happen to John's song "Now And Then"; despite the tweet re-posted above who said that the voice would be remain untouched.
Technically A.I means nothing. Auto-tune is already a kind of model to stabilize the voice (when it's applied lightly); it's a kind of remodeling the voice.
The said-so "A.I" voice models is nothing more than a much more elaborated auto-tune, personalized so to speak : you make it learn and store a tons of recording from the same voice and you will have an A.I models. People who are creating some good stuff are singing first with the same intonation, than let's say a "young" Brian Wilson, then applied the A.I models of Brian Wilson. If they don't do that it does not work because it still keeps the intonation/inflection of the original voice. That's why you can't make directly a Paul's solo song sung by John and vice versa; you have to do your own vocal impersonation of John singing a Paul song. That's how it worked with the "reconstructed" Paul's song from the Let It Be sessions : A Pillow For You Head :

Thus the fear about using A.I and applying it on his father's voice was not totally overacted; A.I was used for audio extraction, but they were beyond applying reverb. To me auto-tune is the old A.I voice model; especially when it's not intended to alter deliberately the voice, like a vocoder, or something like this.

[BDJ]

Another thing they did was to change the pitch of John's vocals. Perhaps that is a reason he sounds different from the demo.
His piano was out of tune; in 1995, they used capo's on their guitars to 'detune' their guitars (see the photo's), but in 2023 they didn't need them anymore. I suppose they used AI to change the pitch of John's voice, and may have introduced some 'autotune' in that process.

[Lord Reith]

Autotune is designed to smooth out pitch though. That's all it does. It takes the normal variations of pitch in a human voice and flattens them out, producing a robotic, soul-less impersonation of a human voice. In a very real sense it destroys resolution. If you imagine the subtle variations of pitch a human singer produces as a type of resolution, then it lowers that resolution by removing the variations.

[Rickenbacker325]

There’s most definitely autotune on John’s vocal…but where’s it’s the most apparent is Paul and Ringo’s vocal parts…how that passed quality control is beyond me…and what still amazes me is that nobody owns up to using it…I agree it’s for the masses but what the heck???