Bill Hare

Bill Hare is an American

His career took a turn toward a cappella in 1988, when the Stanford Mendicants were referred to Hare to record their 1988–89 album Aquapella.^[3][4][1] Their 1990 follow-up album together earned the attention of Deke Sharon in Boston, who had heard the album and who wrote Hare a letter describing his new a cappella society (what would become the Contemporary A Cappella Society, also known as CASA).^[3][2] Hare soon began working with other Stanford a cappella groups, developing new techniques along the way. In a 2019 interview, Hare described the circumstances under which he developed his new recording techniques with collegiate a cappella groups:

"An a cappella group came to the studio... At first I thought it was really weird—why would you do this to pop music? [But] the people were really cool, and over the years, it gave me a lot more creative control. The groups were willing to be experimented on... I developed a lot of the techniques that people still use now just by the seat of my pants, and we had fun creating new things."^[5]

Chief among Hare's innovations was recording each voice with its own microphones. Recording in those days on analog tape, modern techniques such as recording individual parts to a click track and editing them together did not yet exist.^[2][6]

It was his engineering for the

Hare's influence in the recorded a cappella world expanded (even as he continued recording orchestral and concert band albums on the side).[2] With his trendsetting work, Hare began earning a cappella-related awards at a steady clip. In 1999, Stanford University a cappella groups were nominated for a record 14 Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards for their new albums. Hare had produced nearly all of them.^[4]

At the end of the '90s, Hare was friends with the creators of ProTools. He became one of their beta testers, trying the earliest four-track music editing programs, among others. With digital processing, Hare was among the first to include in a cappella music distortion, phasers and flangers.^[2] Hare pioneered the practice of "octavizing" the lowest vocal bass part (lower its pitch by an octave), first included on Stanford Counterpoint's 1996 album "Nomansland".^{[2][additional citation(s) needed]}

In 2001,

For The House Jacks' next album (Unbroken (2003), modeled after Queen's A Night at the Opera), Hare struck a deal for revenue sharing, instead of accepting a fixed fee; this created an opportunity for them to work together until the album was the best it could be. "This was the time to make a breakthrough," Hare later recalled, "That this might be something that would sell outside of [the a cappella community]."^[2]

In 2011, Hare won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album for his work on Calling All Dawns, an album by Christopher Tin (himself an alumnus of the Stanford a cappella group Talisman).^[9][10][11] By the mid-2010s, Hare was working with nearly every top a cappella group, including Sing-Off winners Nota, Home Free, and Pentatonix, with whom he received 2x multi-platinum certification for their album That's Christmas to Me.^[12][13]

As of 2020, Hare has shifted his focus away from United States a cappella toward European and international a cappella groups. For the shift, Hare cites an increasing degree of same-ness in the industry, in part due to the widespread adoption of his techniques.^[2]

Engineering style and techniques

Before Hare, a cappella was generally recorded exactly as a listener would perceive a live performance: with two microphones capturing the whole group at once, singing in a room.^[1] At the turn of the 1990s, over the course of a few albums with Stanford collegiate a cappella groups, Hare developed a new style: This involved recording every voice as one would record instruments: each voice with its own microphone, and each singer just a few inches away from their microphone.^[1][6] Placing all the voices so close to the listener's ear created an entirely new sound in a cappella recording, with increased presence for each voice.^[3] Additionally, a cappella pre-1990s generally included no percussive elements; Hare was one of the first to implement vocal percussion in the style of real drum kits.^[2]

Legacy and impact

Contemporary A Cappella Society founder and longtime president Deke Sharon has said of Hare and his influence on recorded a cappella: "The sound of contemporary recorded a cappella owes more to [Bill Hare's] technique, style, and pioneering than any other person."^[3] Palo Alto Weekly described him as "widely considered the patriarch of a cappella recording."^[12] In his memoir Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory (which was later adapted into the blockbuster film Pitch Perfect), Mickey Rapkin said of Hare's influence: "In many ways, the history of collegiate a cappella recording is the Bill Hare story. Bill Hare is sort of like the Dr. Dre of a cappella recording."^[14]

Awards and recognition

Hare has won one

• Aquapella (1989), an album by the Stanford Mendicants^[1]
• 50-Minute Fun Break (1992), an album by the Stanford Fleet Street Singers^[15]
• Unbroken (2003), an album by The House Jacks
• Fleet Street (2004), an album by the Stanford Fleet Street Singers^[16]
• Pandaemonium (2007), an album by the Tufts Beelzebubs
• Play the Game (2009), an album by the Tufts Beelzebubs
• the Swingle Singers
• Nota (2010), the debut album of Nota
• Great American Songbook (2013), an album by the King's Singers^[17]
• Southern Autumn Nostalgia (2013), an album by Street Corner Symphony
• PTX Vol. II (2013), an EP by Pentatonix
• That's Christmas to Me (2014), an album by Pentatonix