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Perfect Pitch for Those Without It
airrage writes "Sometimes technology is a good thing, and sometimes it ends up in a hardware device called an autotuner. Apparently, it allows real-time pitch correction. They are actually being used at concerts. I think we all realize that some singers sound different -- much different -- live than they do on CD's, but this just seems so, so, what's the word: fake?"
This seems like a perfectly natural progression. Technology has long been used to enhance human beings. One example is the use of steroids to make the body stronger. Of course, in that instance, there are negative side effects. Using this auto-tuner isn't going to hurt your body, so why not? Now bring on the bionic limbs!
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
I would prefer pitch correction done on the fly over some asshat lip-syncing to a recording any day. I'm not sure I'd favor it over a real performance, but I'd have to compare the two.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I can see using a tool like this to get the perfect studio recording -- especially after getting a great take with just a few bum notes.
Using it during a performance, however, is just cheesy. Learn to sing in tune, please.
A concert where the artist sounds great, or a concert where the artist sounds terrible? If I pay $50 per seat, I'd like to hear something I'll enjoy, whether it is slightly modified or not. Bad music isn't fun.
Anyone who thinks that notes can and should be limited to the 12 chromatic pitches of the equal-tempered music system is full of crap. Read a good book on the history of tuning systems. I can detect an autotune-processed track within seconds of hearing it, due to the utter piano-like lack of pitch sensitivity and expression.
The saddest of sad is when you hear autotune processing on the voice of an artist who understands how to use the many subtleties of pitch, yet bows to the record company execs by submitting to the autotuner.
Autotuners have been around and in use for a few years now. Aside from the obvious use of being able to correct pitch on a performance, they also have other uses.
For example, autotuners can be used to change pitch during performance in ways that vocalists simply cannot. A good example (well, most people will know it anyhow) of an autotuner and vocoder used in combination is in Cher's song "Believe"
Antares Autotune is probably the most popular autotuner, and is said to be what Cher's track actually used. It's available in DirectX, VST, and several other versions and has a free trial version for anyone who's interested.
My band used an autotuner plugin when we recorded last year. My singer doesn't have a particularly great voice, but autotune allowed us to spend much less time doing take after take until he hit all the notes right. Yes, it's 'cheating', and 'fake'... but so is recording the same vocal track for two days until all the notes are perfect. There were places where the autotune was too much, and would digitize his voice.. these situations required us to go back and have him re record. In the end, it simply polished off our album a bit more, and unless you are an audiophile you probably can't even tell.
...Don't fake it.
I don't care if people want to "fix" their errors on an album, that doesn't bother me - I can accept an album as a "finished" work of art and enjoy its (presumeably enhanced) merits regardless of the unenhanced talents of the musician (or composer, where that differs from the performer).
However, I go to concerts to see the "raw" work, with no enhancements. If an artist lacks the talent to actually reproduce their work (within reason) in that environment, they should not tour. Simple as that. Selling me the same thing I could have on CD (minus the masses of sweating fans packed in like sardines, $3.50 pints of Aquafina, and idiots who consider a concert a good place for impromptu karaoke) for about $80 less (per pair) does not make me happy.
As an (almost) unrelated aside, another concert peeve of mine - Volume. I went to a concert this past weekend (Tori Amos in Boston) where the performer did well, the set list appealed to me, and the environment in general seemed just about perfect. However, even with earplugs (a must for anyone who actually goes to concerts to enjoy the music), they had the volume cranked so high that the bass completely distorted everything else (as in, I could audibly detect clipping of the vocals at every new bass note or percussive event). This does NOT make for satisfied (much less "happy") concert-goers.
Blue Man Group's rock concert "The Complex" is a parody of rock concert. At the beginning of the show, a voice comes on like this (I'm paraphrasing):
Thank you for purchasing the rock concert manual. This manual will teach you to how host a rock concert. The most important thing for performers is choreography. Will the advent of autotuners and backing tracks, performers can now focus all their attention on dancing. You no longer have to worry about things like hitting the right notes or showing emotion. Start by loosening your hips. Now, lets try this simple beat...
They performed this on Leno recently as well. It is quite funny how they make fun of all the rock concert cliches.
Here's a related read. It's long, but very entertaining. Of special interest is the hilarious account of how the drum tracks for an entire album were edited at great expense, because the drummer couldn't play the drums to save his life.
I get really tired of the 'everything popular is crap' line used on /. in just about every music related post.
/. fashion. Judging a musician based on popularity is stupid whether you are a Clear Channel junkie or an indie elitest.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it not good music. Just because someone is popular doesn't mean that they necessarily will have a bad stage show or use vocal enhancements. Those types of assumptions are close minded in typical
Just listen to the music. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. If you can't handle the artists political affiliation or record label, that's fine too. But don't bash something just because other people like it. It's almost as if people need to feel special by listening to music that isn't popular.
[rant off]
If you're going to an arena show to see a display of musicianship, expect to be disappointed.
Having just seen guitar virtuoso Neal Schon rock out with Journey recently in a major arena, I disagree that all arena shows are mindless Justin Timberlake tripe.
Just ask those who worship Phish.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
no, they got caught(well, they could have covered it totally up actually.. and nobody would have noticed EVER if they hadn't been so succesful).
and anyways, if they had actually sang on the record it wouldn't have been a big deal at all, most of such acts do so. the music is already just a recording(so some recording is necessary) and all of the performance is just dancing(that is very physically demanding, so it would make good singing impossible anyways). playback also saves a lot of soundchecking too so a big name artist can make a quickie(pr gig) at some freebie concert easily.
it's a real piece of comedy though, the whole milli vanilli scandal. i just wish more things like that happened.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
because his guitar slowly loses pitch during the course of the pieces he plays
As do all musical instruments during a performance. The performer adjusts accordingly to stay in tune. Its called intonation. Woodwind instruments change pitch depending on temperature so the natural pitch of the instument at the beginning of a concert is different to the end. Player compensates by 'lipping' the pitch in the right direction. This is one of the major differences between amatures and pro's. The pros have very good intonation.
I feel that using pitch correction is just compensating for lack of skill by either the singer or player.
When you're singing or playing in an ensemble that's out of absolute tune but in tune with itself, you have the unpleasant choice of staying in absolute tune and going out of tune with the group or adjusting and hearing things out of tune, which is jarring.
For a simpler example, imagine trying to improvize in C on a clarinet and hearing the music in Bb. Now that's jarring.
Unbelievably good relative pitch is required for "absolute mastery" of music. Perfect pitch is just a party trick.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
> my guitar would sound pretty boring without some distortion and other effects applied here & there
No, your guitar would sound just fine. Your music, OTOH... If you need distortion and effects to make your music good, it means you aren't a good enough musician yet. I know this sounds like a flame, but I don't mean it to be. Continued practice could turn you into a "virtuoso" of the guitar. Distortion does not an artist make.
I'd be embarrassed to use this sort of thing. If you can't sing/play on key, on command, you don't belong on the stage. Being a real musician is hard work, and that means you perform when you are supposed to. And you do a damn good job at it, every time. And if you aren't in the mood, or you're upset, or whatever, you do it anyway. If you're going to use a safety net like this, you may as well lip-sync to the studio track.
I know this sounds like a harsh approach, but that's the world of the professional musician. I have to question the work ethic of a musician who would need something like this. If you were the leader a band (especially one wth 12+ members), would you want the singer to have a special little box "just in case" he/she made a mistake? I'd rather get a singer who is confident he/she won't make those mistakes. There are more musicians than gigs, so to make it, you have to be there whenever they ask, and don't fuck up.
Pop stars are obviously a different matter, thought. They are much more glamorous, and typically less talented and don't work as hard as the pro musician. They are tossed into a studio to record the next "hit" written by a room full of boring-looking writers, quickly whisked away to a dance studio where the star is yelled at for hours until he/she can dance like a rock star, then a bus takes the soon-to-be-one-hit-wonder around the country while Clearchannel plays the hell out of the new song. This is the kind of person who needs a safety net like that. This is not the kind of person who spent years writing and practicing, accepting any gig that came along, playing to sometimes empty clubs, sometimes double-booking rather than turning down a gig, and driving for five hours to play a four-hour gig. While that may sound like hell to the non-musicians out there, it is exactly the kind of experience that most real musicians go through, and if it weren't for the genuine love of music, nobody would do it. But through that process, the musician learns a lot of discipline, and is ready to sight-read through forty charts with a band full of strangers. Ask the musician if he/she needs a device like this.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Simply by all of the comments already made. For starters, any real musician who plays every note perfectly on pitch will sound odd. Why? Because such an autotuner will automatically "correct" any tonal variance that is added for musicality, such as vibrato, bending, slides, etc. The cases where one needs completely on tune notes is very small compared to the instances where "out of tuneness" is needed. Such devices are useful for salvaging cases where the recording is way out of whack, but don't think that's it's a matter of setting the machine to "fix this" and that's it. Items like these are used more like code optimizers are, lots of tedious going back and forth. And to use this in a live setting? The machine would truly be a hindrance. There are just too many times when the machine would inhibit the notes that really need to be slightly off.
The only ones who would truly benefit from one of these machines in a live setting are those who are truly bad singers. The artificial sound of the pitch shifting would be an improvement over these persons' naturally bad voice.
I sincerely enjoyed seeing Roger Water's screw up the lyrics to 'Mother' on stage in Indianapolis in '99 or '00. That was fantastic.
I like live performances too. Archive.Org is a great place to get live concert music. Big Heat Todd and the Monsters, Little Feat etc..
As far as this: "P.S. Don't steal music." I disagree in a similar way that RMS would disagree with: "P.S. Don't steal software."
If you don't want us listening to your music. Don't fucking play it.
Otherwise I just might be recording your concert.
--ken
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Most singers have imperfect pitch. I'd go so far as to say *every* singer does. Your brain corrects pitch generally to a Pythagorean scale (perfect intervals at fifths and octaves, with the third exactly one-half way between the fundamental and fifth). If you listen to an accappella choir, they will nearly always gravitate toward this scale. The unfortunate side effect of a Pythagorean scale is that if the tune changes to another key, it sounds simply awful. Choirs can get away with this because they adjust their tuning on-the-fly to still sound good with one another when doing key changes.
Pianos, guitars, and many other instruments have a great deal of trouble with this. You'd have to rearrange the fretboard on a guitar to avoid (nearly) even-temperament, and the piano requires a skilled tuner at least 10 minutes or so to adjust. Thus most people are accustomed to hearing something as "in-tune" only when it is performed to an even-tempered scale.
This fights the vocalists natural ability to judge tune based on harmonic interaction with the rest of the song.
As a recording artist, I make regular use of pitch correction. You'll find that virtually every major artist commercial artist does, as well. The "effect" you refer to is often called the "Cher Effect" from the song, "Life After Love", where they intentionally used pitch correction to the extreme. Most uses are quite subtle, and are most often used to smooth out the rough edges in a once-in-a-lifetime recording.
It's possible to pitch-correct large variations in performance (bringing, say, a C to a G) but they sound increasingly unnatural the further you move the note from reality. The human ear is very closely attuned to variations from normal speech and singing patterns. That's why a sped-up playback of a tenor doesn't sound like a soprano -- it sounds like a sped-up tenor.
Anyway, get used to pitch correction. It's been in common use for over fifteen years on commercial recordings, but only recently has the technology become cheap enough that it's accessible to live performance and lower-end home recording artists. It's no more "BS" than a motion picture studio rigging cameras up for "bullet time", trapeze artists using a net, or stuntmen playing body doubles for stars in a motion picture. It's the ultimate quality of the performance that matters, and whatever you can do to bring the quality up a notch is probably a good thing.
Some artists thrive due to their "natural" sound. That's great for them. The rest of us enjoy technology's ability to make our lives more fun, interesting, and better-sounding.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
It is actually an autotuner in that Cher song. Since it embaresses the producers to admit they have one, they claim that it's done with a vocoder. Anyone who have used a vocoder can hear it is not it, however.
Because Elvis infused blues music they didn't understand with simple folk music that they did?
In spite of historians trying to paint it all as racism that promoted rock-a-billy sounds over Muddy Waters and his ilk, the truth is a little more complex. Most of the people who heard Buddy Holly and The Crickets on the radio thought they were a black band. They even got booked at the Apollo, because they were such a big hit on "black" radio! Putting a white face on the cover of a Buddy Guy record would not have improved sales all that much, because the typical white radio listener of the early 50's had never heard anything like it, and could not understand it in the same context that black audiences, who were listening to blues for generations, embraced it.
Besides, half of the blues songs of the 50's were about how shitty life in Chicago is, or how shitty life in the racist south was before going to Chicago, or hard drinking, or poverty. Elvis borrowed a little of that with songs like "Hound Dog", but he also sang "Love Me Tender."
Also, he changed the lyrics of Hound Dog. It should be "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog/keep snoopin' 'round my door/ Keep waggin' your tail/ ain't gonna feed ya no more." Elvis put it into language that the ebonics-challenged white audiences of the time could understand.
I haven't RTFA, but I could almost guarantee you that the "punk" bands mentioned in the article are the ones on major labels that are promoted on image and not music. I'd almost lay money that New Found Glory is among the bands. I last saw them as part of a larger billing two years ago and they were absolutely AWFUL live. The biggest problem? Vocals.
That said, there's a much larger punk movement that actually revolves around the music, not just pushing records. To say the least, Rancid wouldn't sound right with Tim Armstrong's vocals synthed out. (And hey, they're even getting radio play. Weird.) There are plenty of bands out there that don't and, quite frankly, couldn't use such a system. Check out Hot Water Music for a band of amazing musicians whose vocals are rough, yet beautiful and fit the music perfectly. And they pull it off live. Perfectly. Every time. Look a little deeper, and you can still find groups that don't have to resort to digital trickery to produce amazing, moving music.
Actually, as a musician of 25 years, I'd have to disagree that the only ones to benefit from this are bad singers. I have the software version of Antares autotune and have putzed around with it a little (I haven't actually recorded anything yet, I'm just playing around with all this stuff), and it doesn't work miracles.
The singer would have to be decent to begin with - it can make them sound a little better, but a flat-out bad singer is still going to sound bad. An autotuned bad singer just sounds so artificial, it's almost creepy sounding, and I'm not talking about the infamous "Cher / Believe" effect either.
Good intonation is an important part of a good performance, for sure, but so are the nuances, the inflections, the timbre of the voice, and probably most of all, the emotion put into it. Good singers know how to breath when singing, how to control their volume, when to step back from the mic, etc. Autotune won't help any there either, although a compressor would some, obviously. Antares version does offer a graphical edit mode (obviously not for use in real time) that be used to tweak things like vibrato, to an extent, as well as some control even in the default mode (kind of like a threshold setting), but again, 90% of the performance still depends on the singer.
Like any tool, too much of anything usually defeats it's own purpose. Used judiciously in a recording studio, as mentioned in the article, to fix a wrong note under time or money constraints was acceptable even to the critics. In a live setting, I could see applying it to the backup singers, whose vocals tend to take on a more "generic" (for lack of a better term) tonality.
After all, really strict critics could contend that compression and delay are cheating, if taken to the extreme, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone take that position.
But to have it on constantly, on a lead vocal track, yeah, I'd have to say that's the equivlalent of musical perjury. It reminds of guitar players, who, just because they have a stompbox, like a chorus, think they have to have it on 100% of the time. It usually makes their guitar sound thin and buzzy, like some kind of deranged mosquito.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Come on...they deliberately couch their 'criticism' to be demoralizing and insulting. It's an open audition, which is whittled down to .01% of the applicant pool, so no, I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of bad singing. I'd expect everybody there should be able to carry a tune, have a decent voice, and (since it's now de rigeur for pop music) be able to dance.
There is nothing that justifies the abuse and debasement those judges dish out. YOU might think it makes good TV (and, obviously, the producers agree with you), but I think it's disgusting. That is why I never watch the show.
Coping with criticism is one thing. Coping with a person whose job it is to insult you and tell you how worthless you are is something totally different.
I thought Tom Hanks' character was a prick in that movie, so my position has the advantage of being consistent.
As far as how non-gently the performers "deserve" to be treated, what do YOU propose? What would be appropriate "criticism" for somebody who has the audacity to actually try to sing on stage, and not be good enough to entertain you?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Well the 'before' sample has an obviously flat note. However, the 'after' sample takes that note and makes it just a bit too sharp. There's a reason people tend to sing flat rather than sharp, it sounds better. If the 'before' sample had managed to get the pitch up just a bit it would have been fine.
I cringed more at the sharpness of the 'after' sample than I did at the flatness of the 'before' sample. So much for perfect pitch! The ideal pitch for that note was just a bit flat. Of course, you can't expect a computer to know that.
I'm sure an untrained ear wouldn't notice but having played in an Orchestra and sung in a choir, I know how important pitch is. Most instruments allow you to 'bend' the pitch half a tone or more. In an orchestral setting, it's the rule rather than the exception to do just that.
If you put autotuners on instruments in an orchestra, you'd create an abomination of sound. What makes singers any different?
Link
You're taking me a bit too literally I think. The distortion I was referring to was the inherent distortion in any instrument that's not electronic. You don't have to convince me that distortion just makes bad guitarists sound distorted, I know this all too well. But what minor levels of distortion (those not even heard as actual clipping) do is color a tone, just like an EQ. Also, the parent mentioned that "good musicians don't need effects". My point was that being able to use effects well is a skill in itself and while guys like the Edge from U2 might be able to play without them, it sounds better with them because he knows how to use effects correctly.
Yeah, back to the topic at hand. Using autotune to save an almost-perfect take is one thing, but doing it to save your entire show? Nah. Total crap. Frankly I think that albums that abuse autotune are worse than Milli Vanilli's lip synching. It's not any better, that's for sure.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
A key change sounds awful when using a pythagorean scale because the intervals between the notes will not be the correct intervals. This is why we use an equally tempered scale. Every twelve semitones the frequency doubles, and each semitone is larger than the last by an unchanging ratio. Each semitone the same size. This means that we can start at any point in this sequence on semitones, and the scale we play will be reasonably in tune. It is equally in tune no matter what key you play in, but it's also equally out of tune. The scale is called 12 tone equal temperament, or 12TET
The pythagorean scale does not have equally spaced notes. As I recall, the notes will be slightly sharp after you go up an octave. The farther you go, the sharper you get, making the scale play out of tune over large intervals.
A choir sings in tune because each singer adjusts their pitch slightly to make the current chord in tune.
Pianos and guitars have a hell of a time playing in tune, because they can't make minor pitch adjustments like a singer can. A piano tuner tunes the low strings slightly flat and the high strings slightly sharp (that may be backwards) to compensate for the imperfect intervals inherent in 12TET. A guitarist can't adjust, since that would require different fret spacings for each string and rule out frets that go straight across. It would be hard to play, and bends would be out of the question.
He's probably heard it called the "Cher effect", otherwise, why would he have said it. Maybe you just haven't heard it called that.
Ahhh.... Now on to musical differences. I do agree that pich correction is a lazy cheat. It's a way to avoid the mountains of practice required to obtain skill. Those years are important, because in them, you learn much more than how to sing the right pitch. You get a lot more out of them than mere technical skill.