I love hearing how songs are assembled, which is why demos by my favourite bands are so appealing. This is something a little different. It's not quite an oddity, but it is unusual. I'm sharing an MP3 which essentially isolates all of Mr Smith's contributions to the finished studio take of Munich. It's his vocals/vocal harmonies and his guitars. No bass from King Leetch, drums from Ed or Mr Urbanowicz's guitars are present (although you can hear it way, way down in the mix at the start). Basically if you were in the studio and you only wanted to playback Mr Smith's contribution, you'd hear this. In terms of where I sourced this from, there was a competition around the time of Munich being released as a single, where the band gave away the component parts of the song to encourage fans to make their own remixes of the track. I'm pretty sure that this is where I got it from, although I'm not totally certain.
There are studio tricks that you can do with Pro Tools software, to remove all those moments from a recording where a vocalist breathes in before they sing a note. I think the idea is that it makes for a cleaner overall sound, but if you listen to this MP3 you can clearly hear Tom's inhalation is very much evident on the final take of Munich. Personally speaking I much prefer it that way. It helps to retain the integrity of an actual living, breathing human being singing to you rather than a machine assisted voice. The sad thing is that most major label acts or vocalists you hear on the radio will have had all the "breathe-ins" erased, as well as being auto-tuned into oblivion.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand about recording there's only so much space you can occupy in terms of what the listener will hear. The more things that you have going on at once means that some will go unnoticed as instruments and vocals blend with each other to form a unified sound. That's why you get those incidences of listening to a track you've heard many times before and, out of the blue, you hear something new in it. With that in mind, listening to Tom's guitars and vocals in isolation will hopefully offer you an entirely fresh perspective on something which I'm sure is already extremely familiar to you.
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
