MakeShift

Syncopation has been evolving for hundreds of years and is an essential part of most modern music quantizing the living daylights out of a naturally played instrument would only serve to take all energy away resulting in a stiff general MIDI, player piano sounding project.

 
That's what the "humanize" button is for...right??
 
You know, an interesting side effect of auto tune has been that it has, in a round about way, made me a "more in pitch" singer.  It has shown me the areas in which I tend to have pitch issues when singing.  Knowing that I tend to go flat at certain pitches, or slide up to a pitch, and seeing this graphed on Melodyne, has helped me to become a better singer.  Often, I will fix some of the pitch issues and then listen to the song in correct pitch for a couple of weeks.  Amazing how when I go back then and resing the vocals, my ears have been trained and I am pretty darn close in pitch through out the song.
 
I think a lot of that goes back to what Dean said above in that old school was for bands to go out and play for years, develop and hone themselves before being discovered.  Well, in the same way, they often had a chance to refine some of the songs that they were writing and creating by practicing them as a band at length before going into a recording studio.  Shoot, now adays, the DAW is part of the writing tool.  Sometimes I don't even know quite where I am going with the vocals at the time I record it.  So, in this kind of back handed way, the auto tune effect has helped me as a writing tool.
 
I agree very much that the whole T Pain effect thing has gotten out of hand.  I hope that fad dies off soon.

 
I guess the swing slider is also supposed to address that but any attempt here to use "humanize" or "swing"has not resulted in syncopation.
If I understand correctly "Humanize" and "Swing" can only be applied during an automatic quantize? Has anyone ever really got that to work? 
I'm still learning AS and possibly underestimating it's abilities but from what I've observed so far, no automatic quantizing feature is even usable and always results in a badly mangled performance.
 What I have found about AS is, really focusing in on a drum track that I pieced together out of Drag and drop drummer loops. I found the slow decay of a snare was really what was bugging me and after a few hours of addressing that I was pretty impressed with the results. I had that transient plug doing about the same thing but much cleaner sounding results with AS. I also found it useful for getting a few pops and clicks safely out of the way of needed audio, to be clipped.
 

I have an example here where pitch correction has been clearly employed on a singer that doesn't quite have it. This is a new, small australian high school band. They won a competition on a national radio station - Triple J. You may have heard about the Triple J hottest 100, supposedly the largest music poll in the world. Anywho. This band, after winning the comp (not the Triple J Hottest 100, it was an unrelated High School Band comp) were given a free recording session at the radio's studio. The result is below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTfY7kblz1g

Very nice song. It was VERY popular in the crowds. But the playing and singing always annoyed me personally cause it isn't that good. She has a nice enough voice, and the song is nice enough, but it's a bit amateurishness in playing and singing ability. Regardless, the general public didn't seem to actually care at all. I think a lot of people said they preferred it that was cause it sounded more REAL. Made it stand out from all the perfect stuff on the radio now. And compared to commercial radio, this radio station plays many songs that are FAR from perfect (as in digitally perfect).

Fast forward 6 months and they have released a new song. EVERYTHING is tight. Timing is all fixed and vocals are heavily corrected. It's quite audible (due to fairly large correction in some parts) if you know what you're listening to (I'm sure the general public probably wouldn't know the voice is corrected). I personally prefer this NEW version. But something in me still protests a little cause I KNOW they can't perform it this tight in real life! See what you think. So I'm at a bit of a cross roads over it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0qif8kSXeE



I personally think the public won't notice it as much. It'll kind of slip under the radar a bit. It's a nice song, but it doesn't stand out. The other song stood out because it wasn't perfect. It was much more distinctive. The heavily processed new one just sound like another song on the radio. And I think this is a perfect example of where being a bit out of time and key may have really helped shoot these guys into popularity. They they DID sing and play perfect, it could have slipped the radar too!!

I was listening to ELP the other day. One of the things that really stood out for me was that there were so many mistakes in Emerson's performance. Performance fumbles, timing errors. Yet it in no way distracted from the enjoyability of music. The thing is, I know Keith Emerson is a brilliant artist because of it. Today it would be perfect, and I am not so sure I would have the same level of respect for his abilities... perhaps less, because live would not be the same as the recording.