Anyone know which bands have or are rumored to use/have used studio musicians to record their parts? I read a mention of this in another post and thought it was an interesting topic that deserved it’s own thread.
I guess it depends on what you exactly you mean.
I guess now you aren’t talking about Studio musicians the ones that play in like string instruments etc
You mean for example like the guitarist of a band basically not being able to play his part and needing a studio musician to play his part in.
Which would either result in a fucked up live or instruments from playback.
Thats basically what you’re asking for, right?
Which is also something i think no band would ever openly admit
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Takumi from Rentrer en Soi is a pianist + something else for Dir en grey;
I believe, Nightmare has a separate keyboardist that tours with them, but isn’t on the line up (?) - I haven’t seen their recent lives or DVDs in a decade, though, so I wouldn’t be able to comment; MUCC had a separate member doing keyboards for them, but I think he ended up joining officially at some point.
overall, there’s a practice of bands supplying other bands with a guitarist, or solo artists hiring studio members and different touring members (Asagi and Kirito’s solo projects would be an example of that; another example will be Kaya, who has a rotating cast of studio musicians, but largely performs to a backing track.)
there’re some bands where one member is clearly doing the majority of studio recording for both guitar and bass lines, and mejibray would be an example of that.
other than that, specialty instruments (violins, etc.) are typically hired by the label, but the pool of those for VK acts is also fairly small. I won’t be able to give any more details, since I don’t generally think about this topic.
there’s way less collaboration between, say, guitarists or drummers from various VK bands joining other bands for a one-off song or a single/album feature, since this type of stuff is typically done throughout session bands in VK, and there’re not that many exiting ones out there right now.
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Golden bomber xD
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I believe it was Tooru Yoshida (who also did keyboard for Jakigan Meister) who was doing keys for Nightmare, at least for some time. Not really considered a studio musician though. More like support.
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Didn’t 0.1g no gosan make fun of Poidol for using ghost musicians?
Also I think Misery from Megaromania is known to make mistakes when playing live and it’s usually fixed in post for their releases. I remember way back someone pointing out you can watch the footage and literally see them miss the chords but the guitar still played fine. Which reminds me of a “live” video from the band GHOST playing and it was just the studio recorded version sync’d over the live footage.
I don’t blame it on the musicians or think of them being fake or anything. I think this is the standard practice for some studios and I suspect some bands don’t have a lot of control over it.
Otherwise Rookie Fiddler has been credited on a couple Kiryu releases for doing the violin tracks for them.
Dir en grey did gang vocals on a Vasalla release a bajiliion years ago.
That’s not Koichi but Mia playing bass on Mejibray recordings??
I’m not asking so much about solo artists hiring studio musicians to record material, or bands that bring in someone to play violin or keyboard parts, I’m wondering more about bands where say it really isn’t the actual members playing their parts on the recordings. This was alluded to in another thread that showed some social media posts by a singer of a VK band claiming this goes on, that there are bands that hire members just based on their looks, but it really isn’t them playing on their recordings, that the actual parts are played by studio musicians.
I wish it was secretly Koichi playing MiA’s parts 
Won’t that be very obvious when they’re playing live? I don’t understand the logic of hiring studio musicians. Taking guitar as an example, why is there a need to hire a studio musician to record the part when you wrote it yourself? You wrote within your skills and techniques. I’m a guitarist myself and if I can’t do sweep picking, obviously I’m not going to write a guitar solo that includes sweeping.
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That’s something different though. That’s a “Live PV” and very common in vk, even DIR EN GREY has some of them. Considering GHOST disbanded in 2007, I don’t think the sound of the recording would have had good quality, that’s why Live PVs used to be very popular.
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Vexent and kakumay use ghost writers and studio musicians
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these are actually the same guy
he keeps busy
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You’d be surprised. It was a common practice in the 80’s for some of the hair metal bands to have a session guitarist come in and record the solos for the songs on the album, then the band’s guitarist(s) would learn the solos so they could play them live LOL. Warrant did that, and they’ve openly admitted it. The guy that recorded the solos for them has said in interviews that he sat down with them and taught them how to play them after the fact. Also Twisted Sister, and I’m sure many others. And when playing the solos live the guys sort of got them in the ballpark but weren’t 100% accurate to what’s on the record. Also, I read an interview with the drummer of Marilyn Manson who talked about the recording of Mechanical Animals and he mentioned he was nervous going into the sessions because the producer they were working with was notorious for rejecting band’s drummers and bringing Dean Castronovo in to do the drum tracks. And it’s also been rumored that someone other than Lars has done the drum tracks on some of the Metallica records. So replacing band members in the studio with session people is an old and common practice.
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False
Nope
Wasnt Sakura at some point helping MUCC/Satochi with the drums recording?
the Koichi/Mia speculation comes from the simpler bass lines he plays during lives, compared to the studio recordings for the same songs - I’m not a big mejibray stan, it actually started on this board, so you can look it up.
there’s a fairly old VK executive interview alluding to the fact most of starter VK bands release stuff, written and recorded in studio by their producer, but it has no specific names listed.
we can speculate, for example, that Nao from kaggra, who dropped off the public eye would be a type to quietly record stuff for other artists, or Yukari from baiser would carry this practice on with his current producing gig, but in reality, this scene is too small for anybody to spill the real details and prove them in this or that way. the scene is also changing quite a bit compared to 15 to 20 years ago, and a lot of musicians come in there because of the love for music and performing, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect real tea if you’re looking for proven scandalizing facts.
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I think he was(/is) only the drum technician though
There are def some bands that have this situation going on, however no one is going to be open about it. I do know some bands that use ghostwriters and actually just keep the recordings from the ghost writer in their releases, however am not trying to make enemies in the scene or have some youngin vk fans hating me for being the messenger.
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