Aug 23, 2010 Recording engineer Des McKinney, who writes a blog about home recording, recently pointed out 10 examples of what he called 'auto-tune abuse'. None of the artists involved has openly admitted to. A Basic but effective real time Auto Tune Plugin for Windows. Auto-Tune Evo (Windows) A quite complicated but thorough Vst for Pitch Correction. 14 Things Every Music Producer/Artist Should Have in Place. Bass House Track From Scratch in Ableton. Leave a Reply Cancel reply.
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The following sentence might come as a huge shock to teens and Millennials, so stop tweeting for a second, kids, and get prepared for a totally outlandish statement. Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers.
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Yes, I know. That’s hard to comprehend since the pop charts are now dominated by artists who use Auto-Tune, the software plug-in that corrects the pitch of those who can’t really cut it in the vocal department and turns their vocals into robo-voices. While everyone under 30 recovers from that revelation, here’s what I mean by “actual singers.”
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. R&B musicians like the Supremes and the Four Tops navigated their way through complex choreography but still belted out songs out like their lives depended on it.
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.
You can hear the robotic, processed sound of the plug-in on recent hit records like “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga and “Right Now (Na Na Na)” by Akon. It’s also heard on tracks by Kanye West, Britney Spears and Lil Wayne. When West attempted to sing “Love Lockdown” without the plug-in on “Saturday Night Live,” the results were none too impressive and got ridiculed online. You can hear 10 examples of “Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music” on Hometracked, a blog geared toward home recording enthusiasts.
Paula Abdul also uses Auto-Tune on her new song, “Here for the Music,” which she performed (i.e. lip-synched) on “American Idol” May 6. It was evident just how artificial Abdul’s vocals were when she was followed by Gwen Stefani, who gave a warts-and-all live vocal on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.”
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Country and rock singers are said to use Auto-Tune to protect themselves from hitting bum notes in concert. Pop singers use it when they have a hard time singing while executing complicated dance moves (raising the question as to why they’re letting their dancing take precedence over their music). Auto-Tune has become so ubiquitous that indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to protest its overuse.
Building the ‘perfect’ beast
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.
The first of these can lead to inspiring moments, as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones noted in an essay last year. Pioneering voice tweakers include producer Quincy Jones, who punched up Lesley Gore’s vocals with double tracking on “It’s My Party,” and George Martin, who gave us a childlike sped-up John Lennon on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Later on, Peter Frampton wowed audiences with his talk box guitar effect and a decade later, vocals were being put through harmonizers to get jarring outer space effects.
Of course, to pull off any of those effects, you had still had to be able to sing. With Auto-Tune you don’t.
Artists Blamed For Auto Tune 2016
Then there’s the quest for perfection. By the 1970s, producers were able to edit or splice together vocal takes from various tracks and eventually they started to use hardware that corrected vocal pitch to create “perfect” performances. When the sound editing program Pro Tools became the industry norm in the 1990s, kludged-together vocal tracks became the norm.
But too much meticulousness in pop music strips away passion. And the very reason we listen to music, noted the late rock critic Lester Bangs, is to hear “passion expressed.” Auto-Tune makes people sound like robots. And if there’s no feeling, why listen at all?
Some people apparently aren’t listening anymore. Sales of major label CDs are down. But more authentic sounding music still has fans. Paste magazine recently reported that indie music is selling more, and the one area of commercial music that’s remained popular is “American Idol,” where you can’t fake it (unless you’re Paula Abdul).
The producers speak
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”
Craig Anderton, a producer and music writer, observes that Auto-Tune “gets no respect because when it’s done correctly, you can’t hear that it’s working.
“If someone uses it tastefully just to correct a few notes here and there, you don’t even know that it’s been used so it doesn’t get any props for doing a good job,” Anderton notes. “But if someone misuses it, it’s very obvious — the sound quality of the voice changes and people say ‘Oh, it’s that Auto-Tune — it’s a terrible thing that’s contributing to the decline and fall of Western music as we know it.”
One producer who dislikes Auto-Tune is Jon Tiven, who cut his musical teeth in the punk rock era with his band the Yankees, and went on to produce soul singers Wilson Pickett and Don Covey as well as Pixies founder Frank Black. Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing.
“I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says. “You could sacrifice on some levels, but it would seem to me one of the first things you would really be hard pressed to sacrifice is if the person could sing in tune or not.”
Street says the like or dislike of Auto-Tune largely comes down to aesthetics, and likens people’s feelings about listening to unnatural sounds with the way some people feel about unnatural body modifications, such as breast implants.
And that makes sense. After all, today we have models and actors whose faces and bodies were never intended by nature, reality TV that’s not real, and sports “heroes” whose strength comes from pills not practice. It’s totally understandable that the commercial pop world would embrace an unnatural aesthetic. Whether audiences will someday want pop singers who are first and foremost singers remains to be seen.
© 2013 msnbc.com. Reprints
Technology has permanently changed the way we listen to music. One of the artists credited (or blamed) for that shift is T-Pain, the perpetually auto-tuned R&B and rap hit-maker.
Some years ago, auto-tune was inescapable. Every rapper seemed to have an auto-tuned hook or run. The tacky technology was originally used by producers to help correct notes that an artist couldn't hit or hold. The hope was that listeners wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
In the mid-2000s, auto-tune broke onto the hip hop and R&B scene with producers and rappers exaggerating the effect to extremes. T-Pain was one of the first of those artists to feel the success and also the inevitable backlash of auto-tune. Critics said the technology was disingenuous and destroyed any need for vocal talent. Auto-tune wasn't just decried by music purists and angry bloggers — celebrated artists such as Jay-Z came out against it, and even released a song on his 2009 album The Blueprint 3, titled 'D.O.A. (Death of Auto-tune).'
Well T-Pain survived the barbs and is currently riding another wave of auto-tune success with the release of an iPhone app, novelty microphone and a brand new album, rEVOLVEr, released in 2011. The app, I AM T-Pain, lets users auto-tune their voice by singing into an iPhone, whereas the microphone, called the 'I AM T-Pain Mic,' is a stand-alone toy dedicated to auto-tuning.
Mashable had a chance to speak with T-Pain about auto-tune, his app and microphone and the future of music in the age of technology.
The Road to the App Store
T-Pain has always had a mind on technology and saw a perfect opportunity to get into the app game when other celebrities, such as Britney Spears, Pink and Lil' Wayne, started releasing their own apps.
'I said, 'Well, I guess I'm so famous for the auto-tune, I guess I should make an app.' And it's just been flying off the shelves,' T-Pain, born Faheem Najm, says. The app was a smart move. It has been downloaded more than 2 million times since its launch in 2009, according to T-Pain's team. That was just the start: 'You know I had pretty good projections with the mic and a lot of adults buy it, like, pretending they're buying it for their kids .. Adults would call me saying they're tired of their kids slobbering all over their phones,' T-Pain says of his decision to create a mic version of his auto-tune app.
T-Pain insists that the mic is all about making music fun. 'I don't do the whole, 'Put my name on it, make me famous' thing,' Pain told us, although there is a video on T-Pain's site in which he says of the mic: 'I mean, we're just, we're milking this thing baby. We're milking it.' Regardless of the intent, T-Pain's mic is selling well.
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'Hard & B'
It's hard to stay mad at T-Pain, who swears by a type of music he calls 'Hard & B.' It's more about process than genre. 'Basically it’s the hard way of doing music,' T-Pain says. 'I write my music. I produce my music. I sing it. I damn near record all of it myself and you gotta go out and perform it. It’s a hard way of making music. On the other hand, [some artists] get someone to write and produce it and you just sing it in the middle like a puppet.'
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In that sense, auto-tune is less a way for T-Pain to hide his voice but to create music in a different way. 'My dad always told me that anyone's voice is just another instrument added to the music. There was a time when people had seven-minute songs and five minutes of them were just straight instrumental,' T-Pain says. 'I got a lot of influence from [the '60s era] and I thought I might as well just turn my voice into a saxophone.' He credits the core of his music and lyric style to R. Kelly and Cee Lo Green, two R&B artists known for their expressive — and unfiltered — voices.
After years of success, however, T-Pain still enjoys talking about the tech he applies to his voice as a way of educating people on how it works. T-Pain says he studied the technology behind auto-tune to better understand his craft.
Auto-tune, it turns out, is actually sort of hard to pull off: 'You know, because it was made to correct bad notes and stuff, of course people say you just slap it on your voice and anyone who's tone-deaf can make a half-decent song.' It also turns out that T-Pain is a decent singer even without the tech. 'The crazy thing is .. there's always a song [on my albums] with no auto-tune and those are always the songs that go overlooked,' T-Pain says.
Social media has helped alleviate some of that frustration thanks to massive support from T-Pain's followers. Although he has more than 700,000 followers on Twitter, he tries to stay humble: 'I don't know man, because you look at someone like Soulja Boy and all these other people and they have millions of followers and I'm proud to even have two follows; my mom and my dad .. The way that people show me love on Twitter? I don't know man. It's amazing.'
T-Pain has a busy year ahead. After our phone call, T-Pain had a day of interviews with press before heading to Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform 'Drowning Again' on piano and without auto-tune. Through the madness, his iPhone app and auto-tuning microphone continue to sell to legions of would-be crooners and lotharios practicing their Hard & B.