Do Singers Lip Sync During Live Shows? The Music Professional Scores

If you were one of the millions of concerts there were Taylor Swift‘s The Eras Tour In the past year, you might have left the show wondering, “How did you do that?!”

More than 40 songs, 16 outfit changes and three hours of heart-burning must leave the 34-year-old singer exhausted – she has to lip-sync, right? Leader of the Foo Fighters Dave Grohl seems to think so.

At one of his band’s shows in June, Grohl insisted that the pop star does not sing live at his concerts. “You don’t want to suffer the wrath of Taylor Swift,” Grohl told the London crowd. So we like to call our tour the ‘Errors Tour.’ We had more than a few seasons and a f–king lot of mistakes. Just a couple. That’s because we’re actually playing live.”

One of the Us Weeklystudents write to get to the bottom of the issue: “How much money do musicians really pay in concerts?” Pam S. from San Angelo, Texas, asked Us in the latest issue, on newsstands now. “Do they usually disagree with each other on the set?”

From The Eras Tour in other major music productions such as Beyoncé‘s The Renaissance World Tourthe inauguration of the president even Saturday Night Live concerts, Us spoke to a music expert to get to the bottom of this article.

“Today’s musicians rarely lip sync,” the Grammy-nominated mix and sound engineer says Ariel Chobaz – who worked with the likes of Rihanna, Drake, Nicki Minaj and more – he tells Us. “However, they often sing along to backing tracks,” he adds, which are playbacks of recorded instruments and/or vocals.

There are almost as many combos of live and “play” stuff as there are Swift outfit changes or Spinal Tap drums. Which is to say, a lot.

“A rock band probably won’t use any backing tracks. A pop artist will probably use a combination of backing tracks and live musicians, but a lead singer is almost always live,” explains Chobaz. “At major televised events such as the Grammys, the arrangement of having many different singers in a row makes it difficult to include all the singers in every performance. In these cases, they rely heavily on backing band, but again, the main voice is live. “

Chobaz says choreography can be included, as can space, but how the song is “produced” can be more important: It’s difficult to recreate drum loops or stage samples.

“Many parts of the song may not be able to be played live, such as the samples and heavily tuned drums,” he says. “It also depends on how much they want to imitate the song album. If they want to do a more stripped down live version, that’s fine, they’ll perform it live without the backing tracks. If they wanted to reproduce the album’s ‘sound,’ they would use more backing tracks and maybe drums, guitar, bass and lead vocals played live.”

About Swift’s The Eras Toura pop star definitely sings live, but big stage shows often use live performances to create a “larger-than-life sound,” says Chobaz.

“This captures the best of both worlds as the main instruments and vocals are live, and all the other sounds are played,” he said. Us. “[This is] it is necessary because lighting and stage effects such as fire and smoke are all programmed and synchronized in the performance as well, so it is important that the singer and the band play in sync throughout the performance.”

But sometimes indeed it looks like the singers are lip syncing, especially when there’s a lag between the music and their moving lips – so what?

According to Chobaz, this is often the result of a technical error.

“Most of the time if it looks like they are lip syncing, it’s because their microphone is turned down slightly compared to the lead vocal backing track, but if you listen closely, you can hear them singing live,” he said. .

Do you have a burning entertainment question for our team of experts? Email Us at AskUs@usmagazine.com

With reporting by Sarah Jones