WEDNESDAY 13 Will 'Never' Lip Sync While Performing In Concert: 'That's Not Rock And Roll To Me'

March 21, 2019

Wednesday 13 has lamented the fact that so many younger bands rely too much on technology to make their performance sound perfect in the studio and in a live situation. "You have these up and coming bands that just don't even try, or seems like they don't even try, and use an Auto-Tune on their vocals and just… I don't know," he told Loud Hailer in a new interview. "People kind of lost the fun of just getting in a garage and making music, and they go, 'Oh, we can make music through our computer here, and look, I don't have to play this. Look how good that sounds.'"

Wednesday 13 went on to say that he is "not knocking computers," noting that his upcoming album, "Necrophaze", was created using "computers and Pro Tools and things like that." But, he explained, "we use it because we use the technology of what it's used for, but that doesn't mean that we cheat the way that we play or alter the way that we play, or I go, 'Oh, I can't sing that way. Can you Auto-Tune my voice where it sounds good?' If I can't do it, I'm not going to do it. So, technology is there, and people can use it to their advantage, or they can use it way beyond their advantage and do things that's not possible."

He continued: "I can't tell you how many bands I go see live and people are just so into them, and all I can do is listen and watch them and go, 'They're not playing that. I hear four different instruments that aren't even on stage. Who is playing this?' And everyone is just into it and going, 'Yeah! Yeah!' because everyone's grew up on 'American Idol' now, and they think that anyone could just walk in a room and start singing and a band just starts playing. It's like a fairy tale."

According to Wednesday 13, backing tracks are "great" as long as they are used sparingly. "For example, we don't have a keyboard player, and we don't have keyboards in all of our songs, but we do have them on a couple of songs, and we use that track as the background, and it's something that adds to the song, but it's still not like… We don't have like an Elton John player back there doing… It's not the main thing of the song," he explained. "We do use tracks, but we don't use any track. There's no guitars, there's no vocals. If anything, it's all just sounds and little bells and whistles that we add to our music. It's more an atmosphere track than anything that we use, and I've never ever once and I never, ever will use background vocals, fake tracks, guitar tracks, none of that. That's not rock and roll to me. I spent the first half of my life standing in front of a mirror lip syncing and playing along to my favorite records. I'm sure as hell not going to go and lip sync and do that on stage. I'm going to go do what I learned. I stood in the mirror forever. I'm not going to go on stage and lip sync and pretend like I was 12 again. No — I want to give you what I learned."

"Necrophaze" was engineered and produced by Michael Spreitzer of DEVILDRIVER and is due later in the year via Nuclear Blast.

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