Singers with Unperformable Studio Songs (1,431 views)

[Osmosis]

Who are the singers who have had songs that stretch the limits of their vocal capabilities and who were never able (or never chose) to replicate the song live in its studio configuration. Ideally, the song should be a popular song that they are expected to perform more often than not and is a fairly well known yardstick of the singer's vocal state/demonstration of ability.

For each singer, state the offending song and also in what way were they unable to replicate the studio version. An explanation of how they got round it in future performances would also be interesting to hear.

Two starter examples:

1) Jon Bon Jovi - "Livin' On a Prayer" - The key change was unreplicable live. Two versions of the song exist where the section was attempted, The Tube and Bratford 1986. In neither was the section performed in full. Playback of the studio vocals would be used as substitute for future performances, the backup singers would carry the section and the key would eventually be dropped.

2) Celine Dion - "All By Myself" - The climactic F5 was never performed live. The song was never performed live in the original keys of A major and C# major so the high note F5 was never performed live.

Are there any other distinct cases of this happening? 

[Homelander]

Robin Gibb. This guy was able to hit C♯5s almost effortlessly in the studio, but he basically never went above A4 live. It's not that he necessarily couldn't, considering how effortless that A4 sounded. I guess he just didn't really want to exert so much effort on a consistent basis. I don't blame him, tbh.

[Electric Mami]

“Froggin Bullfish” by Periphery. Spencer Sotelo will probably explain it better than I would:


“Godish”, originally by vocaloid producer Pinocchio-P, covered by Ado. She never performed it live and I wonder if she ever will, due to how ridiculously demanding it is: one of her most range-y vocal performances (C♯3 - F3 - C♯6 - F♯6), an unsettling amount of tone switches and range jumps, not to mention all the takes overlapping for her to cover the song as she wished. I could mention a passage in particular, but the entire song is like that. Now of course, she could use a few lines on backing track to catch a breath on the faster parts or change the pitch to a monotonous version of certain passages, but she already demonstrated when performing passages like the second verse of “Utakata Lullaby” or the famous and dreaded “Aishite Aishite Aishite” that making things more simple isn't really her way of proceeding lol

[Osmosis]

I find both of your examples interesting because it seems the primary difficulty in translation of the songs to a live setting is a question of arrangement rather than perhaps the singer's ability to hit the required notes night after night. The songs are simply too busy as well as being technically challenging.

Homelander are there any specific songs that Robin Gibb really bailed out on or was he just across the board a conservative singer?

[Homelander]

Apr 6, 2024 9:20:55 GMT Osmosis said:

Homelander are there any specific songs that Robin Gibb really bailed out on or was he just across the board a conservative singer?

I think it was mostly a matter of being a conservative singer. Even in the studio, he didn’t have a ton of really demanding songs. He just tended to stick to the easier ones live.

[jaredletoisbackagain]

For Matt Bellamy, there are a couple of these. He's an incredibly consistent live performer, but while there are a handful of songs that were never performed live like in the studio. Madness was always dropped a half step to turn those incredible Bb4s into A4s live. Eventually he would switch them out for falsetto instead. This was the case for a couple of songs like City of Delusion and Ruled By Secrecy, where the difficult chest notes would just be replaced with falsetto. Then there's Big Freeze which was never performed live, probably due to its difficult vocals.

But the most interesting example is probably Sing For Absolution, where the ending is filled with G4s and A4s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6eHLEa3gxg&t=3m45s This is probably the cloest he's ever gotten to performing it properly in the original key, and even then you can hear that many of the lines have been replaced with falsetto.

The key of the song was quickly lowered after the first few perfomances in 2003. Since then, he's performed it in a variety of ways, trying to belt out a different part of the ending each time. Wien 2003 (my personal favourite), Glastonbury 2004, Tokyo 2007, Sherpherds Bush Empire 2017

[Steingrim]

"The girl is mine" with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. McCartney never sang the fabled A1 live. There's a video labelled "This is it tour" where they seem to sing it one semitone lower, but it's merely been transposed down.

[Electric Mami]

Apr 10, 2024 11:33:32 GMT jaredletoisbackagain said:

This was the case for a couple of songs like City of Delusion and Ruled By Secrecy, where the difficult chest notes would just be replaced with falsetto.

As far as I remember the only time where he actually belted the G#4 at the end of Ruled by Secrecy was ironically the last time Muse performed it in 2012. There are really few instances where he actually went for these notes or at least tried them. Very interesting example of how singers handle studio vs li e

[Osmosis]

Liam Gallagher - "Slide Away".

This is a peculiar live song. What tended to happen with Liam and the more demanding songs is they would be trialled for a few performances then would be dropped due to the strain it put on Liam's voice. Examples include "Rockin' Chair" (performed 4 times), "I Can See a Liar" (performed 6 times) and "My Big Mouth" (performed 6 times). Liam hardly ever changed the melody of the song to make it easier to sing.


"Slide Away" is an exception to this. The chorus features 4 jumps G4 and a sustained D4 into E4 at the end of the first post chorus to lead into the solo. Liam has never sung all 4 G4s in a chorus and has never sung the E4, and only on two occasions has he sung the D4. Even the first time he performed it here he only sings 3 G4s and opts to sing a lower melody in the post chorus. The most he would manage after this performance, would be a maximum of 2. Even when he became more agile in 1996, he never performed the song with the studio melodies in tact. Strange considering E4 was not exactly a high note for Liam in the 90s.

[jaredletoisbackagain]

Apr 11, 2024 8:00:07 GMT Electric Mami said:

As far as I remember the only time where he actually belted the G#4 at the end of Ruled by Secrecy was ironically the last time Muse performed it in 2012. There are really few instances where he actually went for these notes or at least tried them. Very interesting example of how singers handle studio vs li e

Yeah I listened to every bootleg of Ruled By Secrecy that existed back on Muselive just to see if he ever did it. The only time was as you say, in Glasgow in 2012. Matt 2012-2013 was a different beast and I honestly would have loved to hear him to try on all their old songs at that point.

The only found instance of him singing the A4 in City of Delusion was in Denver 2006. Can be heard here in the last chorus: youtu.be/ndhAOS_QnsY?si=eb04EG6_-iSHHq0T

[Hennessy Macklemore III]

Savatage - "Paragons of Innocence"

This song is feat of vocal endurance that would be almost impossible without the ability to do studio punches. That's very obviously the case on the pre-chorus here (the lines at 0:38 and 0:43, for instance), the chorus (0:56 obviously has some bleedover from the previous line that's tracked over, and then pretty much every line for the rest of it was likely tracked one at a time), and then most prominently the rapped part at 2:56 was definitely broken up a bit in the studio and ESPECIALLY the endless "gotta let it gotta let it" repeats at 3:13 are an obvious copy-paste. I'm imagining someone trying to sing this song all in one go (especially with that level of performance intensity) and just going absolutely blue in the face and passing out lol

As far as I know, Jon Oliva never performed this song live with Savatage, but I found a couple performances of Zak Stevens singing it with Circle II Circle. In this one, he breaks up the vocals by doing every two lines on the prechorus, chorus, and bridge and then having his keyboardist sing the next two, then back to himself etc. Between the two of them they're able to pull off the entire song, but the fact that the keyboardist has to take over that much of it really goes to show just how much of a two-person job this song is vocally. My guess is that all the parts that they do tradeoffs here are the parts that were punched in the studio.

Motörhead - "The Game"

The vocals in this song are arranged in a call-and-response vocal style, but with Lemmy as the only voice doing both parts. There's some very obvious bleedover in the tracks between the calls and the responses, like at 0:25 when you hear them overlap on "all about contROL" and "AND if you can take it". Most of the rest of the song continues like this, with very little breathing room for someone who would be trying to do both parts, or some moments that are just straight up impossible to do with only one voice because of the way the tracks overlap.

Motörhead did play this one live a couple of times, in which Lemmy made a valiant attempt to sing the entire thing by himself, but he must've realized how much he had written himself into a corner with it vocally and prepared a backup plan for how to handle it live. He makes a few strategic changes to lines like "I'm the game, you don't wanna play me" instead of "I am the game", and "All about the game, and how you play it" instead of "It's all about the game", because when you're delivering those kinds of rapid-fire lines back-to-back, even saving yourself a syllable can make a bit of difference in terms of the amount of breathing room it gives you. Then later on he has to settle for singing "...shoulder, ready to run" instead of "Look over your shoulder, ready to run", just because there's no room to get those words in with only one voice handling all parts. He also changed up the rhythm of the vocal parts and made it a bit more syncopated to give himself a bit of breathing room, though on certain lines it sounds like he may have resorted to changing the words altogether (or forgot his own lyrics, who knows).
I've actually performed this one live a couple times in a Motörhead tribute band, but when we do that my bassist and I break up the call and response lines so that one of us is singing each of them and the other is singing the other part. Makes it MUCH more manageable and doesn't leave anyone gasping for breath trying to get through it, thankfully. In theory Motörhead themselves could have done that as well, but Phil Campbell wasn't much of a vocalist.

Avenged Sevenfold - "The Wicked End"

M. Shadows seems to LOVE writing vocal parts that involve not only bleedover between lines, but also lots of harmonies and words at fast tempos, just to make things harder to do live. That's also something that's prominently featured in "Bat Country", but this song might be an even worse offender of it. You can already hear that the lines before and after 0:31 were punched in in different takes, then at 0:37 you hear bleedover on "don't kill the messenger CAUSE" and "AS if we haven't swam enough in this life of misery". Then on the chorus there's a call-and-response vocal part with Shadows' voice on both parts in the studio version, but thankfully he at least has bandmates who can help him cover the response part live. Then on the second verse things get even more demanding, because he starts throwing in higher parts that require additional breath - meaning that singular lines involve 1-2 punches in order for him to make it through them.

Once again this proves to be a song that the band did not play live very often, but there are a few select recordings of out there that I was able to find where they play the whole thing. In this one, Shadows makes it a little easier on himself by singing some of those high parts an octave down instead, and also gets some help from The Rev on the call-and-response parts during the chorus, though the way they arranged the tradeoffs seems far less practical than what I would have imagined, and still leaves Shadows to do a lot of the work of stitching together those parts that feature heavy bleedover on the studio version. Then at 1:46 you can hear a moment where Shadows just full-on runs out of breath and has to stop singing for a moment to recover. He also gets some help from The Rev at 5:17 taking over the higher part so he doesn't have to go for that big D5 after singing all the rest of this monster of a tune.
Overall I still will give Shadows props for how much of the original vocals he was able to recreate on his own during this performance, but speaking from a practical standpoint, if I were him I would have let The Rev take over on more parts, or perhaps just not write such a ridiculously demanding and exhausting vocal part in the first place.

[blazejecar2]

the studio version tries to lead you to believe he sang the whole bit from 1:47 to 2:40 in one breath or 2 at most. I'd love to see how they plan to do this live

[Osmosis]

ah that's like "Monkey Wrench". I'm still yet to see the sources supposedly confirming that he completed the studio performance of the bridge in 1 take. Live, he goes on for about 20s then takes a breath, or just abandons the section all together and lets the audience sing the section.

[Hennessy Macklemore III]

Apr 13, 2024 7:58:36 GMT blazejecar2 said:

the studio version tries to lead you to believe he sang the whole bit from 1:47 to 2:40 in one breath or 2 at most. I'd love to see how they plan to do this live

Good call - I had listened to this song a few times before but had never caught this! They really do blend the punches together in a way that seems completely seamless and all done in one go, but now that I listen to it taking what you pointed out into account, there's no way that could've been physically possible to keep up with for that long. I wonder if they ever are gonna play this one live, and if they'll have to have John Roth or Reb Beach sing some of these lines as trade-offs with Kip in order to break it up.

Apr 10, 2024 11:51:38 GMT Steingrim said:

"The girl is mine" with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. McCartney never sang the fabled A1 live. There's a video labelled "This is it tour" where they seem to sing it one semitone lower, but it's merely been transposed down.

This, however, feels like it's broadening the criteria a bit too much for me. Lots of singers have singular lines/notes that they dodge live, but I wouldn't consider that the same as an entire song that isn't possible for them to recreate live. In fact, the majority of popular singers don't try to go for their lowest notes live, simply because that register doesn't project as well in a live setting. Ones who actually do still try (and don't even always succeed) to hit their lower notes live are really much more of the exception than the rule - hell, even Peter Steele dodged a lot of stuff from F♯2 and below live.

So with all that in mind it doesn't really seem fair lump in vocalists who perform low parts an octave up live with vocalists who have to make much more drastic accommodations to certain arrangements to stand any chance of singing them live.

[Steingrim]

Robert Plant, Stairway to Heaven.

In the studio version, he sings the final refrain one octave up, to a blistering E5 in chest voice. I don't know if he replicated that in a live setting early on, he did certainly sing chest D5s live around 1970. But in the live clips that I've heard, he either sings that whole refrain on the same note, an A4, or he messes around with it and falls short of the original melody line. Robert Plant sang chest A2s live already in the 1960s and the song doesn't go below E3, so a key change would have been just fine. That I know of, he hasn't done that. Maybe recently, but he's getting old.

[Osmosis]

Apr 15, 2024 8:26:53 GMT Steingrim said:

Robert Plant, Stairway to Heaven.

In the studio version, he sings the final refrain one octave up, to a blistering E5 in chest voice. I don't know if he replicated that in a live setting early on, he did certainly sing chest D5s live around 1970. But in the live clips that I've heard, he either sings that whole refrain on the same note, an A4, or he messes around with it and falls short of the original melody line. Robert Plant sang chest A2s live already in the 1960s and the song doesn't go below E3, so a key change would have been just fine. That I know of, he hasn't done that. Maybe recently, but he's getting old.

I was thinking of Robert Plant when I made this thread however, I have come across versions of Stairway to Heaven live where he does indeed land the original melody of Stairway. Here is one such example. Here is another. Lands the notes rather well in these examples. Did he sing it that way post 1971 though? Probably not however, he did it enough times to say it wasn't unperformable live. Had he had less longs in that league it could have been doable for longer. 

The song I was actually thinking of was "Black Dog" which was only ever performed once with the original melodies fully in tact. Although no other studio accurate performance of the song exists, he did at least manage it all the way through once so again, I'm not sure it would count.

You might be interested in this reddit post Steingrim it attempts to chronicle Robert Plant's vocal evolution: www.reddit.com/r/ledzeppelin/comments/a27hzo/the_vocal_evolution_of_robert_plant_an_indepth/ 

[Steingrim]

Apr 15, 2024 8:51:57 GMT Osmosis said:

Apr 15, 2024 8:26:53 GMT Steingrim said:

Robert Plant, Stairway to Heaven.

In the studio version, he sings the final refrain one octave up, to a blistering E5 in chest voice. I don't know if he replicated that in a live setting early on, he did certainly sing chest D5s live around 1970. But in the live clips that I've heard, he either sings that whole refrain on the same note, an A4, or he messes around with it and falls short of the original melody line. Robert Plant sang chest A2s live already in the 1960s and the song doesn't go below E3, so a key change would have been just fine. That I know of, he hasn't done that. Maybe recently, but he's getting old.

I was thinking of Robert Plant when I made this thread however, I have come across versions of Stairway to Heaven live where he does indeed land the original melody of Stairway. Here is one such example. Here is another. Lands the notes rather well in these examples. Did he sing it that way post 1971 though? Probably not however, he did it enough times to say it wasn't unperformable live. Had he had less longs in that league it could have been doable for longer. 

The song I was actually thinking of was "Black Dog" which was only ever performed once with the original melodies fully in tact. Although no other studio accurate performance of the song exists, he did at least manage it all the way through once so again, I'm not sure it would count.

You might be interested in this reddit post Steingrim it attempts to chronicle Robert Plant's vocal evolution: www.reddit.com/r/ledzeppelin/comments/a27hzo/the_vocal_evolution_of_robert_plant_an_indepth/ 

He struggles somewhat at the end in both examples. In the first he doesn't hit the last E5. Doing stuff like that may have contributed to his eventual vocal decline in the mid-70s. 

[cancelik]

The most famous "studio only" song is Painkiller from Judas Priest I think. It s recorded with a full chest and strong rasp (even the verse is so high, about C5. So it's recorded by little sequences probably, than merged). There is no way Halford could sing it in one take that way. And the only thing I hear at live shows was a funny falsetto. Even at his prime days.

[Osmosis]

Gerard Way - "Welcome to the Black Parade"

I have never heard him sing this song all the way through with its original melodies. Granted it is a busy song, but even in the choruses before the key change, I do not think I have ever heard him go for the the main melody line - he always opts for a lower harmony part.

[queenfan11]

Metallica's "Spit Out the Bone" seems like a very hard song to sing live, as the vocal melodies in the verses leave very little breathing room. When performed live, Hetfield has always alternated lines with Robert Trujillo.

As for a literally unperformable studio song, Queensryche's "Screaming in Digital" comes to mind. It has numerous overlapping vocal lines all sung by Tate on the studio version. Live, those would be either on playback or sung by another band member.