Say I'm Your Number One (Princess, Stock/Aitken/Waterman) - Synths (And some WEG stuff!)

[desmond]

Super helpful - thanks!

I think that definitively answers the "It's Sting!" question. The last thing that remains is to try to identify what the girls were singing - it's too hard in the track to make out, but hopefully the raw recording are easier - if it can't be made out on the raw recordings, then it's probably never going to be identified!

I just loaded WEG and the street sample into Reaper, and it's pretty hard for me to hear what's being said on the original. It sounds to me like there are two girls' voices, and if my ear was better tuned to Cockney or Estuary English, I might be able to pick out what they say. You can hear one of them singing some. But her intonation and timing is kinda odd, so it makes it hard for me to tell what she says.

This is the bit with the singing that I was trying to isolate from the track and identifiy:
intro_chatter.mp3

Note: Stephen Hague said in a recent interview that he brought the traffic noise tape in to the studio, rewound it, they started the track and hit "play" on the tape, and listened to see whether it would work. He said "s**t - we should have recorded that" to which the engineer replied, "I *did* record it" (Pro engineer tip: Always Be Recording!), and that's what ended up on the record.

So it makes sense that it was near the beginning 30 seconds or so of the first recording that matches the record...

[synthroom]

This is the bit with the singing that I was trying to isolate from the track and identify:
intro_chatter.mp3

I can't figure out anything she says except the last word sounds like "forever" to me. There is a line in Careless Whisper with that word, about 3:00 into the song there's the line, "We could have lived this dance forever."

But I can't get the words she says to match the words leading up to "forever."

So on listening again, I think I hear " (and?) on the night where __ __ forever."

Here's a clip I made removing the right channel and putting a low and high pass filter on to try and isolate the vocal.
https://synthroom.com/wp-content/upload ... unds-1.mp3

Just before the car horn is this - which sounds to me like, "Can you ___."
https://synthroom.com/wp-content/upload ... an-You.mp3

Between the car horn and the singing is this bit that I can't make out at all:
https://synthroom.com/wp-content/upload ... unds-2.mp3

I'm reluctant to post more or longer sections as the PSB lawyers shut down the original eBay auction when these recordings were originally offered there.

[desmond]

This is great - thank you for doing this!

I think I have figured out what it is!

Ok, I verified it by denoising it a bit more in iZotope RX. I think I’m the first to figure out what it is - for me it cannot be anything else - I’m very confident!

Essentially, it’s a bit like what often typically happens when there’s a camera in public - people come up in front of the camera and wave to get on TV etc. In this case, what I think happened is that the girls saw the guy nearby holding a recorder (“a very good one” Stephen said), and one of them chants, in a British contemporary accent:

“Get on the mic-ro-ph-one” - in other words, singing something loudly so they could be on the recording.

And she wasn’t wrong - she made it onto a number 1 single!

That singing bit has bugged me since 1986 when I first read that article. It’s great to have it resolved!

The last final word is probably impossible to identify - I like to think it's "forever!" as that would tickle my sense of poetry! (Edit: I just noticed you also thought this!)

“Get on the mic-ro-ph-one.... forever!”

The clip with the footsteps has the words "Can you ***" - can't quite get that third word yet, but this is only with five minutes of spectral denoising. The second clip I can get to the words, but can't identify them yet, except the last word sounds like "whisper" (but the first isn't "Careless" I don't think!). I'll keep having a go at those other clips though - but the singing bit is what I really wanted to nail.

Thanks soo much for helping with this!

[desmond]

Revisiting the (glorious!) bass sound in WEG as I hadn't nailed it yet:

Listening to the record though, there is clearly some stuff going on in the mix - firstly, it's certainly compressed/EQ'd, but more than that, it's actually got a stereo spread going on, so they've done something so it to stereo-ise it some - whether than was some chorus or other pitch thing, or whether it was layered with another synth and spread left and right, I don't know.

My comment here seems on the money - from the David Jacobs Track Record, IM 1986 article:

"I use the AMS harmoniser on a lot of things in the mix with a setting of 0.999 on one side of the image, 0.998 on the other side and the uneffected signal in the middle. Particularly when mixing to digital, it gives a kind of ADT or wavering effect that the rocksolidness of digital can lack. Otherwise, the mix was very straightforward."

Looking again at synthroom's WEG example disks, this throws up some interesting observations. These Fairlight disks were as mentioned sampled from copies of the master tapes, which means we can assume these *are* the final sounds used on the recording - for example, the ambience noise was provided on those tapes, so this material obviously comes from those sessions.

So we can realistically suppose that the bass sounds *are* the dry bass sounds used on the record - as stated, the DX7 for the low end, and the Jupiter 6 for the higher squelchier stuff. The two WEG disks use different bass sounds - the first seems to be a single sample of two layers, and the second seems to be two separate samples, the low end and the squelch. So that much matches what we know.

synthroom can probably confirm the bass parts that were on the original supplied recordings at some point.

However, the bass sound is *way off* what we hear in the record. I know, it's a CMI II sample of the source, so will lose some character (and gain some!). But this leads me again to realise that a lot of the sounds that I've loved in these tracks over the years is often really made in the *mix* - harmoniser, blending, probably SSL EQ and compression that really bed that bass in and make it the monster sound it ends up being.

So any attempts at recreation must bear this in mind. Next time I'll go back to the bass sounds I've been working on to get close to it, paying closer attention to those ones on the WEG disks, and trying to do less with the synths, and more with the FX and blend, and see how I get on.

Illuminating, and I love getting these kinds of clues to investigate how some of my favourite sounds came to be.

[desmond]

I wrote this stuff up in a blog post, with quite a bit more info:

Sound Diving #1 - West End Girls
http://www.muzines.co.uk/blog/sound-div ... d-girls/43

Big shout out to synthroom above for helping make this happen!