Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers. Yes, I know. Back in the day, pop artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles used to be able to record albums in just a few days. Country musicians like Patsy Cline and George Jones trudged through grueling tours in out-of-the-way rural locales yet still missed nary a note.
And while today, we still have singers with massively impressive pipes, a whole lotta them could never have rocked it for real like the Motown gang. These days, artists are able to get by on looks, publicity and aid from Auto-Tune. Firkins explains that even the most talented singers need it some of the time and would be arbitrarily holding themselves back to abstain from using it.
It doesn't mean you're not talented. It means you're talented and somebody has the foresight to apply some great technology to your project. That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing. Auto-Tune has not only changed the way music is made, it's also shaped the way music is heard. Hildebrand pointed out that we're all pretty much used to hearing our pop music vocals perfectly in tune now, which can make older music—even classic oldies by The Beatles or the Beach Boys—sound somewhat grating.
By changing what we listen for, Auto-Tune really may have ruined music in a certain sense. Some critics have argued that Auto-Tune threatens to homogenize the vocal idiosyncrasies that define many of our most beloved singers. Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday were interesting precisely because they weren't conventionally "good" singers. So by making all singers sound the same, Auto-Tune risks achieving the opposite reaction.
We're all pretty much used to hearing our pop music vocals perfectly in tune now, which can make older music—even classic oldies by The Beatles or the Beach Boys—sound somewhat grating.
Which is where Future comes in. Or, to take things back, where Cher comes in. During a studio session Cher mentioned hearing a telephone vocal effect on TV that she really liked. Taylor had just bought the Auto-Tune plug-in, shortly after it first came out, and that night he began playing around with it and discovered the zero setting. He applied the effect to Cher's vocals, and nailed the ethereal tone they were searching for.
Then he put it on. Producers and engineers immediately wanted to know how Taylor had done it, but he was evasive. In an interview with the producer trade publication Sound on Sound , he claimed the effect was a trick he had pulled off with a Vocoder, even though he knew there was only one way to get that specific sound. Today he's slightly skeptical of what he sees as the overuse of Auto-Tune, explaining that he'd like to see some new, innovative tool come along. But where Mark Taylor left off with Auto-Tune, many other have since stepped in.
By the late '90s and early '00s, Auto-Tune had become prevalent in most recording studios, but engineers were mostly using it for its intended purpose of subtly correcting a vocal performance. The J. Lo effect was just what he needed, although he had no idea what it was. He says he spent around two years combing through CDs loaded with bootleg software and trying different plug-ins searching for the right effect.
When he finally did figure out the zero setting, T-Pain was ecstatic, running through the house in excitement. Like Taylor, he also kept his technique a secret. For the next few years, as he shared his music around town, he pretended to have his own spin on talk-box technology that didn't require singing with a tube in his mouth.
Both landed in Billboard's Top 10, the latter in particular becoming a viral success that marked T-Pain as a stylistic innovator. Nonetheless, the narrative surrounding T-Pain at the time seemed to focus mostly on his attempts to disguise himself as a "real" vocalist—the title of his debut album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, played into the notion. While people enjoyed his vocal effects, they didn't necessarily know what to make of them, assuming it was some sort of vocoder trickery and wondering when he'd get bored of the gimmick.
With his omnipresent No. An excellent take with slight pitch problems can be very subtly altered with Auto-Tune to create the perfect take from an emotional and technical standpoint. You seem to be missing the point entirely.
Your article is completely pretentious. It casually tosses aside the reasons most real people are disgusted with the ubiquitous Auto-Tune, namely, its ubiquitous-ness and the fact it helps no-talent hacks get music deals as their engineers make it sound like the no-talent hacks can sing , and finally, every rapper under 20 years old insists on using Auto-Tune so they can sound like a robot.
Its pathetic. Nice try, Mr Straw-man! Auto-Tune sucks, big time…. To the extent that technological […]. I feel that with many types of music the instinctive use of micro-tonal elements brings additional emotional information that is culled by a strict adherence to the tempered scale. I think it has a subtle chilling effect, like spreading mayonnaise on everything.
I hope we get over the need to quantize and robo-tune the individuality out of our music, someday. I think your comments are excellently presented.
Very interesting. Pop music, an already over-processed genre now had robotic-sounding vocals which became harder to relate to due to their unnatural sound. Some musicians such as T-Pain took it a step further and pioneered his sound using the extreme aggressive setting of autotune, completely removing any life from his sound.
Pop music during the late 90s and early noughties took on a very childish sound. Especially as the industry was trying to figure out the use of the effect, it became a dark time for pop music.
A hole in the quality of sound, coupled with the surge of computer production, which still was quite young and developing tore into popular music. While autotune is, on the whole, much more tamed and transparent nowadays, there are still some otherwise good songs ruined by the obvious abuse of autotune. Something which is designed to correct vocals to make them sound better now leaves the listener with the impression that they must have sucked to start with.
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