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The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune
theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand."
As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
Auto-Tune does real-time processing.
Chris Cornell uses this for the end of "I Am The Highway" (i think that's the name). That's what their talking about when referring to using it in unusual, unanticipated ways.
put the what in the where?
I have a harmonizer that I bought back before this guy supposedly invented this process, which does pitch correction in realtime, and can definitely be used live.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It's already here, and it sucks. Give a listen to Billy Joel's singing of the national anthem at the super bowl.
That performance would have undoubtedly been better without auto-tune.
Queen still used synths in the 80s though.
:).
Not sure if most people really cared whether they did or didn't. All I know is I like most of their stuff that I've heard so far
Actually, I'd rather Dr. Dre, Eminem and Jay-Z have guns than Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I've read what they wrote and I've read what others have written about their lives, any man giving those people automatic weapons should be sent to jail for a long time.
Is this some kind of zombie joke? Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg have all been dead for a long time now.
I have real-time auto tune on my digitech vocalist 4. The only song I've ever used it on was Purple Rain, because it gave exactly the desired effect. It's actually quite easy to tell when someone is using it -it does sound jumpy and automated although much less so than even 5 yrs ago, the real shit-kicker will be when the algorithm is improved to the point where the average ear cannot distinguish that the machine is doing the pitch,timing, formant and dynamics.
The disclaimer on their early albums wasn't because they felt synths to be artificial or 'unmusical' or even 'cheating'. As you rightly point out - they used synths a lot in the '80s.
It was because they, together with their producer Roy Thomas Baker, created a wall of sound using ONLY guitars and vocals as the source. They wanted people to know that these eerily perfect sounds weren't coming out of a vocoder or synthesizer - that they hadn't taken any shortcuts.
Squirrel!
Vocoders have been developed since 1936.
The problems always were the number of channels/bands. The more, the better it sounds. But only with computers, you can simulate many of them, without it resulting a huge machine.
As an example, a typical vocoder that I used for fun effects (because nobody says than any of the two inputs has to be voice, or even an instrument), had 8 bands.
Modern software, like the one from "Native Instruments" has 1024 bands, and I bet they went up since I last looked, nearly two years ago.
And that's all. It's just that since it was the style at that time to add noticeable vocoder effects on purpose, and that nowadays you can have them very powerful and very cheap, that everybody knows how to use them. So if you're a big music producer of a crook (which is the same thing) why not make more cash, by not letting you stop by the little annoyance of a totally crappy singer, when she has big tits.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There was a very exciting interview on CBC Radio last year about various artists who do or don't use pitch control software and why they do or don't.
The expert being interviewed pointed out that of all the singers analyzed, Bob Dylan has nearly perfect pitch. You may not like the tone of his voice, but his pitch is spot-on.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
>One day I'd like to see a collection of music charts sorted by author rather than by performer and see if there are any interesting patterns...
You'd see Linda Perry all over the place, for one thing.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Drummers have been using triggered drums since the mid-80s. Neil Pert, famously, used them to avoid the difficulty of keeping drums in tune between recording sessions. For live play it is even more useful, especially for outdoor venues.
For rock musicians, the trick is that the triggered drums feed into a synthesizer that uses recordings of "perfect" drum hits. To use the same example, Neil Pert spent hours getting just the right sound from each drum. Then he triggered his drum set, with the triggers actuating those "perfect" drum recordings.
Personally, I don't see what's the matter with this. You could get the same effect by just spending a lot of extra time tuning drums. Other musicians use it to get effects you couldn't otherwise get from regular drums.
However, this is different from auto-tune, where singers sound more talented than they really are. In the case of triggered drums, drummers just sound like better drum tuners than they really are.