Sunday, September 21, 2008
The Great Auto-Tune Debate of '08
So I must admit, I've long been skeptical of Auto-Tune. The thought of bad singers using a synthetic voice processor to make palatable sounding recordings is disheartening. And also there's just something about me that is still an analog purist so I've always hesitated. But as of late I've heard a string of songs, primarily in the hip-hop and R&B field, that is making me change my tune, figuratively. Guy's like Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Chris Brown are making this thing work, and they're kind of doing for the Auto-Tune what Roger Troutman did for the Vocoder. They've taken it from being a tool used to correct bad singing and made it into an instrument that can be tweaked and processed for full emotional and audial impact. And best of all they're feeding in good vocals to the mix now which I think is that final missing ingrident. Why have Cher's decaying howl singing "Believe" when you can have Lil Wayne's grimy growl or Chris Brown's young Mike Jackson pitch perfect style.
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5 comments:
I'm still not quite sure what Auto-Tune is... I think Chris Brown is one of the most talented Americans around, but I can't believe he can dance like that (geez, a lot of moves to remember), AND be ACTUALLY singing the song. Doesn't Auto-Tune mean lip sink?
I think it is a machine that you sing into and it's got little dealie on it to adjust the pitch. People use to make it sound like they are singing from outer space, headlining a rager on Mars for an audience of robots, bobbing their antennaes and blinking their LCDs in time with the beat.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it an instrument as a special effect. It's like when Rage Against the Machine yells into a megaphone or Andy Griffith whistles.
Actually I should've noted that the clip is of Twitch and Comfort from So You Think You Can Dance. Seeing them do that live was the first time I'd ever heard the tune, and the dancing was pretty bad assed so I thought I'd put that clip up.
He's is a great dancer, have to give him that.
I think everyone would be surprised at the level that Auto-Tune is used in today's recording industry. I would guess that it comes out of sheer laziness of doing another take and insecurity about what a mistake is as compared to humanality, given the standards that have been assumed by the commercial market of music. The difference in the range of uses for Auto-Tune can be portrayed by comparing, let's say, "Californication" to "Believe." "Californication sounds like a solid inspiring rock vocal performance, when it's probably a Frankenstein of a few performances with any pitch mistakes slightly corrected by Auto-Tune plug ins. "Believe" is taking Auto-Tune to a instrumentation level, where you use Auto-Tune's and harmonizing knowledge to create delay, atmospheric, and harmonizing effects on Cher's vocal performance. Wikipedia has some great break downs of how it works. It's quite simple, but different than the vocoder. Imagine take someone's ECG and adjusting the actual line using a computer program. There's technology now that can do this with not only tone, but rhythm and chordal structures.
I think that it's respectable to use anything for instrumentation and expressive purposes, but it's the acceptance that one actually doesn't have to be able to sing that makes the whole thing sickening. For instance, someone like Tim McGraw, entertainers of this nature, probably rely exclusively on Auto-Tune to deliver what they perceive as the intended level of entertainment consumers are paying for. Obviously we know this is completely inflated and goes along with the seemingly natural progression of modern humans to turn themselves into robots and find some way to justify it.
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