Autotune is a tool of the devil

I know we work with tools of technology. But my local grocery store is locked on a modern country station, and even piped through crappy Quam or worse speakers in the ceiling, I swear I can hear that autotune on damn near every country track. That artificial slide-up in pitch, it's very recognizable to me.

I guess the vast majority of the listening (and buying) public can't hear it, or maybe they just don't know enough to identify it. I bet some wonder why modern music "sounds funny like that."

To be honest, I don't like the sound of a lot of modern productions. I don't hear a lot of depth, or space, and it's very harsh to my ears.

Am I the only one?

one more....

ORIGINAL: chefmike8888

Thats funny, I always just thought it was the country music hurting my ears.

LOL

Oh boy....we've totally lost all sense of what intonation REALLY is. But since I can't actually sing, I'm OK with tuning a few notes here and there to make things less torturous.

But DON'T YOU DARE start patching up violin concertos with that autotune nonsense!!

This topic appears at least once a year

I've come to embrace Auto-Tune (well.. V-Vocal) as a wonderful tool but I try like heck to make it sound seamless. If you simply hit the auto button you get those annoying artifacts. If you take the time to go in there and do some bit level surgery, you can usually get it to sound pretty lifelike. Whoever it was that did the Cher stuff created a unique sound effect and everyone had to jump on that bandwagon which is annoying I agree. Just like all that two-handed tapping that Eddie Van Halen started. Or any number of other annoyances that were cool one time and then became completely annoying (like all those Matrix special effects).

ORIGINAL: Rain
Nowadays, it seems that the sound of the voice is all that matters (well, after the pretty face that is)...

"pretty face" of course being a highly subjective quality -- the legitimacy of which I highly contest in many cases. Often it's just a contest of the makeup designers...

Didn't he steal it from Bud Powell?

hey, a friend sent me this link, don't know if it's circulated around here, but on the subject of autotune horror:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYIMmi7JtHc

Watch this and weep,

I hope Billy Joel murdered the sound engineer!!!

Yeah, on the subject of Keith's vocalizations, I could never decide if he was going more for lowing camel, or dying walrus, or possibly elephant-in-rut. In any case, it has always struck me as ironic that such a giant of the piano, with crystalline touch and astounding, near-perfect technique and seemingly limitless melodic imagination, whose records were produced by a notorious perfectionist (Manfred Eicher), would not try to contain that a little bit. I kind of get that it was all part of him being In The Moment; I can relate to that, having done several similarly long-form, fully-improvised solo piano concert recordings, but still.

ORIGINAL: subtlearts
Yeah, on the subject of Keith's vocalizations, I could never decide if he was going more for lowing camel, or dying walrus, or possibly elephant-in-rut. In any case, it has always struck me as ironic that such a giant of the piano, with crystalline touch and astounding, near-perfect technique and seemingly limitless melodic imagination, whose records were produced by a notorious perfectionist (Manfred Eicher), would not try to contain that a little bit. I kind of get that it was all part of him being In The Moment; I can relate to that, having done several similarly long-form, fully-improvised solo piano concert recordings, but still.

This goes right along with Leonard Bernstein's foot-stomping and....uh.......levitating (shall we say?) -- both of which gave his engineers fits.

I guess not everyone is a Karajan, Heifetz or Oistrakh. Those were men of impeccable, almost super-human physical control. I can't imagine discussing "autotune" with one of them. WHAT A JOKE!

ORIGINAL: syrath

ORIGINAL: krizrox
Whoever it was that did the Cher stuff created a unique sound effect and everyone had to jump on that bandwagon which is annoying I agree.

Just for the record according to the mixing engineer that did the work on that particular song, it was not done using autotune. It was actually a vintage (read 70s) vocoder. However for some reason everyone credited it to autotune.

Actually, you got it backwards. The engineers purposefully lied when first asked about the technique, crediting it to the vocoder. That's the myth. They actually did use autotune but initially wanted to keep the technique secret. More info here...

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb99/articles/tracks661.htm

And Cher wasnt the first to use "That Technique." R&B singers were doing that way before she did.

But what do you expect. You hear a song and everyone expects it to be perfect these days.
I was once with an engineer that said, "A famous rock singer" used two Eventide pitch correctors to ensure that he was on pitch during live concerts.

Autotune can be tedious to work with sometimes. As previously noted it can take some work to get it just right. I personally think it should be used to correct slightly out of tune notes. Maybe we are expecting too much from it and arent really using it for what it was designed for. But hey if someone is paying you $50-$100 / hour, and you needed cash wouldnt you autotune too.

ORIGINAL: rchristiejr

But hey if someone is paying you $50-$100 / hour, and you needed cash wouldnt you autotune too.

I'm sure everyone's situation is different but a lot of people that come through my studio hate Auto-tune (or at least they hate the idea that they need it). I've proposed using V-Vocal on many occasions and got shot down by the artist. Which, I think, is a credit to the artists who would rather spend the time to get it right as opposed to the easy way out.

And yeah, I know two-handed fretboard tapping predates EVH but let's face it, Eruption was the song that started that revolution. Check out Polar Nights by the Scorpions. Ulrich Roth had incorporated two-handed tapping into his musical vocabulary at least a year or two before that first VH album.

I'm suprised professionals use auto tune as much these days. Melodyne, even when used across and entire track on 100% setting, does it a lot better without most of the "slides" and artifacts. Scary good.

Even when it sounds right, it sounds wrong.