I'd love to see Kanye West in a room with say...Dann Huff, Jeff Berlin, Vinnie Colauita & perhaps Patrice Rushen. That cocksure mouth (insert joke here) would finally (hopefully) be muted, as he'd quickly realize that he is not quite equipped enough to contribute in any meaningful way. A bit of humility may do the young buck a bit of good.

Not trying to hate on the mate, I just don't appreciate his disrespect of that video music awards show that he was supposedly 'dissed' on.

Occasionally, I get a sort of snarky, petty, slightly mean-spirited pleasure when I hear some top 40 record clumsily using an effect like autotune in a way that sounds particularly fake or artifact-laden. But what is really sad to me is not the use of autotune to make bad singers sound better, but when autotune is used to make good singers sound bad.

Round pegs are sonically hammered into square holes by the recording industry and there’s nothing new about that. What is new is that the musicians seem to be down with it. It seems to me like more and more of the musicians I work with WANT everything to be triple-tracked guitars and stereo-widened, sample-replaced drums and layered, hundred-take vocal performances with any pitch gestures or idiosyncracies hammered out in the studio.

If there were a Neil Young or an Otis Redding or a Sam and Dave out there today I wonder if we’d even be able to tell. It seems to me like they’d be looking for recording techniques to make them sound more “normal,” and that the technology would deliver. And instead of having personal, unpolished musical messages that people would still want to listen to in 30 years, we’d have another bland, slick, disposable pop tune good for the Shrek 3 soundtrack and a Pepsi commercial before it dies out in 3 years (Remember Chumbawumba?) .

In the hands of a skilled engineer, something like pitch correction can be done so transparently that you can’t detect it. And that’s a good thing. We can salvage the once-in-a-lifetime performance by the tired, impoverished, studio-frightened, just-signed singer who delivers her heart and soul on take 42 and blows out her vocal chords and sings flat just before the last chorus. 10 years ago, we’d have to go over budget and do another 20 takes a week later and end up with a B- instead of an A+, and possibly permanently damage the confidence of a genuine young talent.

Autotune also allows people who can’t sing to sound like they can, and that’s also a good thing, even if our innate sense of artistic fairness rebels against it. I’m sure the first players of fretted string instruments were ridiculed for needing frets to hit the right note, but the fact is it allows more people to make music that they’re happy with and to feel like they did a good job and have something to show to their family and friends and that’s a good thing.

And if a bad musician gets a hit record because an engineer made them sound good, who cares? It’s not like mediocre musicians with hit records is anything new. That’s what makes our engineering skills valuable. I pride myself on my ability to make slack-jawed plank-wankers sound like rock stars. There were ways to achieve this before autotune, that’s for sure. If everyone who walked through the door was John Coltrane they could just set up an omni mic in the middle of the room, press record, and fire my sorry ass. Our job is to produce hits with the artists we’re hired to work with, and anything that allows us to make them sound like they know what they’re doing is a godsend, because God knows most of them are clueless.

What IS a bad thing is that people are using autotune to fix things that SHOULDN’T BE FIXED. Can you imagine if some engineer went back and “corrected” Keith Richard’s guitar playing? Or digitally “repaired” the snarly atonality from Keith Morris’ early records with Black Flag? Or “perfected” the raw, untrained sound of Grandmaster Flash with modern studio techniques? Or “fixed” Bob Dylan’s intonation from the 60’s? I guarantee you, if those records were made today, AT LEAST three of the four examples above would be some overblown, autotuned, Shania Twained, hundred and fifty takes monster of triple-tracked everything with super-compressed, smiley eq’d ugly-hype sound and that the musicians WOULD GO ALONG WITH IT. In fact, they’d probably outright DEMAND it.

They’d thank the engineer at their grammy speech and talk about how the studio was like a whole nother instrument. They’d have a whole team of specialists recreate the studio sound live so they won’t be embarrassed on SNL (BTW, it’s amazing how many acts on SNL really NEED autotune and DON’T use it-- I mean, it only costs like $300, right?).

There is nothing sacred about the 12-tone scale, it’s made up. Totally arbitrary, invented for convenience. There are an infinite number of “notes” between A and Bb, and there is nothing inherently wrong with any of them. In non-western music they are quite ordinary. Guitar players routinely squeeze notes and fret harder in ways that don’t quite count as a “bent” note, but that add tremendous expressiveness and emotional urgency to their music. Singers and songwriters who are not classically trained use these “in-between” notes all the time.

Wholesale pitch correction steamrolls over all of this. It takes a forest and tells it that every color must be either red, orange, yellow, green, or blue and that’s it.

Orchestral music and high-level jazz music uses the twelve tones to create rich, resonant, tension-laden harmonies, delivering new and complex sounds that are far greater than the twelve-note scale encompasses, but folk and popular music has always done things very differently. It has been made of solo musicians and small ensembles without classical training in theory and composition who just played what felt right, unconstrained by musical awareness.

From the open-tuned bluesman grabbing random frets and bending till they sound right to punk bands playing in the key of fretboard dots to psychedelic hippie singers moaning and howling away over randomized clusters of organ notes, the stuff that has made popular music worthwhile has NEVER been the ability to perfectly sing a one-four-five melody without dissonance, it is the ability to create something greater than the sum of the melodic parts.

Forcing that stuff into a rigid melodic structure can kill it in a heartbeat, and what’s awful is that the new breed of popular musicians are being conditioned to think that that’s what it should sound like. They WANT to sound musically bland. They hear any interval more complex than a triad and think something’s out of tune. They think that doing the whisper trick to get throaty vocals and having a double-tracked wall of Mesa Boogie amp emulators is what makes them sound edgy and exciting. They think that stupidly busy computer-generated melisma makes them sound soulful. And they think that any trace of pitchiness or tonal idiosyncrasy sounds “old.” So they all want to sound the same, like a video-game soundtrack.

I bet that somewhere out there on the radio there’s a modern-day Bruce Springsteen or a Donna Summers or a Nirvana or an O’Jays that we don’t even know about because modern production techniques have ironed out any trace of musical personality from their performances. And I’ll bet the engineer on the session was ordered to remove the musical gonads from the record by tin-eared mooks and a producer earning points who didn’t want any pitch information interfering with their masterpiece of sweetened musical wonder bread. And the sad thing is, I’ll bet that the musicians not only allowed this to happen, but actively encouraged it.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: Silence Please!
And than there is Audioslave at the end of "Show me how to live"... but at least that is obviously an intentional effect... and sounds pretty cool.

nope. flick your throat while changing notes. ten bucks says no auto-tune on that one.

just curious how do you hear that someone uses autotune? im kind of curious. is it just that a note is placed on the wrong halfstep or what? or does it actually kill the overtones. just curious.

i think that Cher song was overtly vocoded though. i dont think that was an autotune hack job.

but yeah i read the rest, ill check out those songs. thanks for the advice.

Look up pop band Eiffel 65 and listen to any of their tracks. It's for effect but still it's annoying as all hell after about 2 min. :)

ORIGINAL: lukasz
i think that Cher song was overtly vocoded though. i dont think that was an autotune hack job.

It sounds like vocoding, and the processes are related, but it indeed was autotune. It's been out for over 10 years.

very interesting discussion.

I use melodyne - but I use it as a time saver. Perhaps I shouldn't, but it seems alot easier to nudge up or down a note than go into to the booth just to re-take something that I know will fix easy.

What I have found myself doing though is insisting the rhythm section is recorded as live. This has added a ton of feel to our newer stuff which before I would've quantised out.

I do also agree that pop-music is becoming incredibly sterile,- great I say - it makes independent music all the more interesting, and the quality of good indy music has never sounded so good.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

ORIGINAL: yep

What IS a bad thing is that people are using autotune to fix things that SHOULDN’T BE FIXED.

Absolutely.

There is nothing sacred about the 12-tone scale, it’s made up. Totally arbitrary, invented for convenience. There are an infinite number of “notes” between A and Bb, and there is nothing inherently wrong with any of them. In non-western music they are quite ordinary.

I know what you mean, but to be fair, the 12 tone scale is based upon the overtone series. It's been tweaked, however, to accommodate modulation. It was part of the homogenization of Western music. Our loss, I think.

Forcing that stuff into a rigid melodic structure can kill it in a heartbeat, and what’s awful is that the new breed of popular musicians are being conditioned to think that that’s what it should sound like. They WANT to sound musically bland. They hear any interval more complex than a triad and think something’s out of tune.

The world-wide spread of Amerikan pop has resulted in other cultures losing touch with their own heritage. Musicians in India despair that young generations are losing their sensitivity to the smaller intervals. The tyranny of our system is contributing to the demise of these great musical dialects.

FWIW - The Cher vocal effect ("Believe") was made using a Digitech Talker, not AutoTune.