Rhonda Vincent - When The Grass Grows Over Me - Great PSG

Greg Cutshaw · Post by **Greg Cutshaw** » 21 Feb 2014 5:50 pm

Full song from YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx4pBhzaa6I

Larry Baker · Post by **Larry Baker** » 21 Feb 2014 7:22 pm

I think Mike Johnson.

Clyde Mattocks · Post by **Clyde Mattocks** » 21 Feb 2014 10:11 pm

Mike always knows how to treat the song. And how long has it been since you've heard a steel up in the mix like that? Maybe Buck Owens?

Tony Prior · Post by **Tony Prior** » 22 Feb 2014 2:06 am

I believe Mike commented that he produced several tunes on the new RV CD...there's a thread around here somewhere from a week or two back...MUSIC I think...

Peter Nylund · Post by **Peter Nylund** » 22 Feb 2014 5:11 am

Outstanding playing by Mr Johnson. And the vocals are nicely pitch corrected also.

Greg Cutshaw · Post by **Greg Cutshaw** » 22 Feb 2014 6:48 am

Peter, FINALLY! someone besides me noticed that the pitches on the voices and fiddles on Rhonda's later stuff are pitch corrected. I love her singing and her fiddle pickers. But in some places the 3 part fiddles sound like an accordion they are so precisely tightened by the software. I'd prefer the natural slightly off key sound of her real voices instead of the pitch corrected ones, ala the Osborne Brothers. Anyhow the steel playing by Mike is awesome and awesomely mixed and mastered.

Greg Cutshaw · Post by **Greg Cutshaw** » 22 Feb 2014 7:16 am

Amazon has a really generous set of samples of the 6 bluegrass and 6 country songs on this 2 CD set:

http://www.amazon.com/Only-Me-Rhonda-Vi ... da+vincent

Peter Nylund · Post by **Peter Nylund** » 22 Feb 2014 7:46 am

The clean corrected vocals does not bother me at all, in fact I like it and I wish I could use pitch correction on my steel, I sure could need it. Most productions nowadays use some kind of correction, so what the heck. What bothers me is people that claim they haven't used any helping gadgets.

David Shepack · Post by **David Shepack** » 22 Feb 2014 9:12 am

Greg, I had the privilege of singing with Rhonda. She came to our campsite for turkey dinner, and I sang Amazing Grace before dinner. She sang a verse, and blistered the varnish off of my mandolin. When the chorus came I growled and snarled at my crew to sing loud. We got a big ole smile out of her.
Anyway……the chick CAN sing……without a microphone!!!!! You don't get to be Bluegrass female vocalist of the year , FIVE YEARS IN A ROW, without having a set of pipes. But yeah, her engineer over did it with the pitch correction. You shouldn't be able to notice it.
That being said, sometimes I like a " perfect " vocal sound.

chris ivey · Post by **chris ivey** » 22 Feb 2014 9:37 am

beautiful mike johnson steel. he plays more sensitively than just about anyone thes days.

about pitch correction. i imagine the 'gentleman' brought it up as a jab at the singer.
why do people use it? if the singers off, wouldn't it be the prideful thing to do be to leave it in it's honest state, or go learn how to sing on key and do it over.
some singers personality is built on slight imperfection. (or in the the case of porter...or kristofferson...a whole career)
or is it the producers call to ensure sales that everything fit into a cookie cutter.

i think rhonda does well enough on her own.

i wonder if anyone ever tried correcting a dylan album?
i think honesty is the best policy or you're selling
a lie.

David Shepack · Post by **David Shepack** » 22 Feb 2014 9:45 am

Greg, I just watched the video you posted. The gentleman in the first picture is Danny Paisley. ( I sang with him too, at a partyâ€¦. WAY TOO MUCH FUN ) Anyway, the song in the video, has a lot of slides. In that situation pitch correction comes in very handy, but also is much more noticeable. Do you think there was too much compression as well?
Sorry for name dropping. Our ( The Grillbillies ) cuisine is how I got to meet, feed, sing, and jam with some of the great Bluegrass artists.

chris ivey · Post by **chris ivey** » 22 Feb 2014 9:56 am

clyde...if you haven't heard steel mixed well since buck owens, you haven't been listening.

David Shepack · Post by **David Shepack** » 22 Feb 2014 10:06 am

Chris, I think pitch correction is used to save time ( time is money and studio time is expensive). I try not to use it, but sometimes I use it when I am too tired to get it right, or when I can't get the singer back to fix a problem that I hadn't noticed.
Back to Bluegrass. the Bluegrass Police gave me noise for adding reverb to my daughters tracks. They want it RAW. But, shut up, I wanted her to sound like a choir of angels from up above. ( like the backing singers in Paul Ankas " Lonely Boy" ) They also pounded me for double tracking. Again…shut up. "Bohemian Rhapsody " had 120 vocal tracks. My daughter IS Bohemian. 120 tracks of my daughter, could peel the paint off of your house. I'll shut up..I think I had too much coffee.

Brett Day · Post by **Brett Day** » 22 Feb 2014 10:54 am

Mike also played on Rhonda's record she did with Gene Watson, and it's awesome too! Rhonda loves the pedal steel guitar, in addition to the mandolin. I think Mike played pedabro on one of her bluegrass records too.

Bill Ford · Post by **Bill Ford** » 22 Feb 2014 11:07 am

The man has tone all over his hands, gotta love the leadout run on his break, great picking.

BF

Walter Jones · Post by **Walter Jones** » 22 Feb 2014 1:37 pm

Does she tour with a steel player in her band?

Walter Jones · Post by **Walter Jones** » 22 Feb 2014 1:37 pm

Does she tour with a steel player in her band?

Mark Eaton · Post by **Mark Eaton** » 22 Feb 2014 2:39 pm

No, not unless she is going to do something special to help promote this new project. She tours with her bluegrass band the Rage, with her son-in-law Brent Burke on dobro.

Rhonda has made occasional forays out out of the bluegrass side and into the country side with pedal steel, Brett mentioned the record with Gene Watson - but it's not her bread and butter.

I've read a couple interviews with her about this new album, Only Me and she does love traditional country music.

It's a double CD, six bluegrass songs on one, and six country songs on the other. They could have fit them all on one disc, but I like the approach they took. It didn't cost any more than if it had been one CD.

Greg Cutshaw · Post by **Greg Cutshaw** » 22 Feb 2014 3:13 pm

I have all of Rhonda's CD's and her DVD, big fan, and I buy them when they first come out. Pitch correction on a solo voice or instrument seems to works well. When two or three parts harmonies are pitch corrected, they just sound awful phony, too perfect, to my ears.

I tabbed out one of the solo parts that Mike did on the Gene/Rhonda album with a very cool use of the 1st string F# to G# knee lever to get a 13th chord.

I've seen most of the country greats sing live and mostly on perfect pitch with no computer correction! Pitch correction is not going away but it is an edit of the singer's voice. Not much different than PhotoShopping a model's picture.

David Nugent · Post by **David Nugent** » 22 Feb 2014 4:13 pm

Mark...I believe that the fiddle player is her son in law (unless she has a second daughter married to a band member?)

Jim Hartley · Post by **Jim Hartley** » 22 Feb 2014 10:31 pm

Fiddle and dobro players married to Rhonda's daughters.

Mark Eaton · Post by **Mark Eaton** » 23 Feb 2014 12:31 am

As Jim said. Hunter Berry the fiddle player has been married to Rhonda's older daughter for several years. The younger daughter's name is Tensel. That name I can remember, you don't across that one very often. The tying of the knot with Tensel and Brent is fairly recent.

In the band an all, those boys are thick as thieves with Rhonda's two daughters!

Barry Blackwood · Post by **Barry Blackwood** » 23 Feb 2014 9:37 am

Wow, tough crowd.There are plenty of examples on Youtube of Rhonda's "uncorrected" singing. I don't think she needs the help. Unless their are many egregious pitch errors, they should leave the AutoTune off. My feeling is, just because you can doesn't mean you should...

Greg Cutshaw · Post by **Greg Cutshaw** » 23 Feb 2014 10:32 am

After watching Connie Smith sing last night and Eddie Stubbs play the fiddle without AutoTune or Melodyne, I am convinced that people like them are truly superior talent. It's a live band sound on the Marty Stuart show with raw sound but precise tuning. Rhonda, on her live shows, does have really tight harmony vocals with her band and they beat the pans off the too perfect computer corrected ones on her latest records.

Tony Prior · Post by **Tony Prior** » 24 Feb 2014 3:44 am

but the Marty show is taped...it's not "LIVE" on TV, it's "Live" in front of a studio audience.

I'm not saying they do double tapes on the Marty show but I have been to LIVE shows being taped where they have done multiple tapings of a song or two...because of mistakes and equipment issues...