Vocals in old house songs

Generally speaking, were the vocals on old house songs done for the song or was it leftover audio the producer scrounged up from somewhere? I'm leaning toward the latter...

i'm sure it depends on the track. lots of vocals were reused from other songs, yeah. but then some are also recorded for the song originally, like 'love can't turn around' or something. got any particular tracks you are wondering about?

Man, there's so many of them. One quick example, old Altrn8 era of techno, that song with the sample 'give yourself to meeeeeeeeee'. Stuff like that. Very professional sounding vocalist, but I don't see a producer hiring them and I don't see what songs these samples could have come from(I listen to a pretty good amount of old soul and r&b and have NEVER come across a house sample). So if they don't hire em, and they're not sampled, do producers have access to unfinished/unreleased vocal tracks? And if they do, how do they get access to them..?

let yourself gooooooooooooooo

Higheeeeeer

Everybody's freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee to feel good!

alot of old house originated as dance/club remixes of songs that wouldn't really fit the vibe of the clubs at the time. a lot of disco and early 80s electro soul stuff. record companies in those days needed to have their singles played in the clubs in order for them to become popular, so they always had to have a dance remix on the b-side. a lot of those remixers were famous djs who we now associate with house. that accounts for some of the vocals. i imagine from that point on it was just kinda seen as a standard feature, so they just hired chicks to sing random hooks for them.

  catsonearth said:

alot of old house originated as dance/club remixes of songs that wouldn't really fit the vibe of the clubs at the time. a lot of disco and early 80s electro soul stuff. record companies in those days needed to have their singles played in the clubs in order for them to become popular, so they always had to have a dance remix on the b-side. a lot of those remixers were famous djs who we now associate with house. that accounts for some of the vocals. i imagine from that point on it was just kinda seen as a standard feature, so they just hired chicks to sing random hooks for them.

and it's still the same.

Nice, great answer, totally makes sense. For now I guess i'm stuck with acapellas.co.uk

actually these days it happens the other way around a lot too. a house track sans vocals becomes very popular in clubs and later they add vocals to make it radio-friendly and sell it.

in most of the good acid house tracks it was just the producer of the track saying stuff or there mates/girlfriends whatever.

most of the 'house' music made frm 83-89 was just commerical style house studios or labels hire singers or visa versa the labels hire house producers to make 'popular' music for a backing track, which in some label like dj international released records with instrumentals and accapella edits: people liketodd terry liked to sample disco acapellas

if you go on piratebay you can get a wealth of house accapellas.