updated 6/2/2009 10:01:02 AM ET2009-06-02T14:01:02
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The following sentence might come as a huge shock to teens and Millennials, so stop tweeting for a second, kids, and get prepared for a totally outlandish statement. Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers.
Apr 15, 2017 Gentle Pitch Correction Using Auto Tune Graphical Mode’s Curve Objects. Nov 03, 2016 Vocal tracks suddenly sound distorted when editing podcast audio? I use Reaper exclusively for editing podcast audio, so I'm mostly dealing with vocal tracks. While editing my recording yesterday, I noticed that both vocal tracks suddenly were sounding distorted, almost metallic. Can't find info on how to 'auto tune' speaking voices. I want to do a very short track in 'Auto Tune the News' fashion. I have LogicPro 9 and Absynth and that's it.
Overdrive/Distortion plug-in for vocals. I want to put some bluesy/rock/gritty distortion on some vocal tracks I'm working on, but am limited to using plug-ins. Any recommendations out there for any favorites? I'm going for a White Stripes/DFA1979 vibe. EDIT: Wow, so much goodness. Will definitely be checking out these suggestions. Just like a real human voice, the software will take a few milliseconds to gently ease from one note to the next. But Auto-Tune came with the option to reducing the space between notes to zero, thereby forcing the notes to change instantaneously from one to the other, giving the vocal track an eerie, computerized timbre.
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Yes, I know. That’s hard to comprehend since the pop charts are now dominated by artists who use Auto-Tune, the software plug-in that corrects the pitch of those who can’t really cut it in the vocal department and turns their vocals into robo-voices. While everyone under 30 recovers from that revelation, here’s what I mean by “actual singers.”
Back in the day, pop artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles used to be able to record albums in just a few days. Country musicians like Patsy Cline and George Jones trudged through grueling tours in out-of-the-way rural locales yet still missed nary a note. R&B musicians like the Supremes and the Four Tops navigated their way through complex choreography but still belted out songs out like their lives depended on it.
And while today, we still have singers with massively impressive pipes, a whole lotta them could never have rocked it for real like the Motown gang. These days, artists are able to get by on looks, publicity and aid from Auto-Tune.
You can hear the robotic, processed sound of the plug-in on recent hit records like “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga and “Right Now (Na Na Na)” by Akon. It’s also heard on tracks by Kanye West, Britney Spears and Lil Wayne. When West attempted to sing “Love Lockdown” without the plug-in on “Saturday Night Live,” the results were none too impressive and got ridiculed online. You can hear 10 examples of “Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music” on Hometracked, a blog geared toward home recording enthusiasts.
Paula Abdul also uses Auto-Tune on her new song, “Here for the Music,” which she performed (i.e. lip-synched) on “American Idol” May 6. It was evident just how artificial Abdul’s vocals were when she was followed by Gwen Stefani, who gave a warts-and-all live vocal on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.”
Country and rock singers are said to use Auto-Tune to protect themselves from hitting bum notes in concert. Pop singers use it when they have a hard time singing while executing complicated dance moves (raising the question as to why they’re letting their dancing take precedence over their music). Auto-Tune has become so ubiquitous that indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to protest its overuse.
Building the ‘perfect’ beast
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.
The first of these can lead to inspiring moments, as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones noted in an essay last year. Pioneering voice tweakers include producer Quincy Jones, who punched up Lesley Gore’s vocals with double tracking on “It’s My Party,” and George Martin, who gave us a childlike sped-up John Lennon on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Later on, Peter Frampton wowed audiences with his talk box guitar effect and a decade later, vocals were being put through harmonizers to get jarring outer space effects.
Of course, to pull off any of those effects, you had still had to be able to sing. With Auto-Tune you don’t.
Then there’s the quest for perfection. By the 1970s, producers were able to edit or splice together vocal takes from various tracks and eventually they started to use hardware that corrected vocal pitch to create “perfect” performances. When the sound editing program Pro Tools became the industry norm in the 1990s, kludged-together vocal tracks became the norm.
But too much meticulousness in pop music strips away passion. And the very reason we listen to music, noted the late rock critic Lester Bangs, is to hear “passion expressed.” Auto-Tune makes people sound like robots. And if there’s no feeling, why listen at all?
Some people apparently aren’t listening anymore. Sales of major label CDs are down. But more authentic sounding music still has fans. Paste magazine recently reported that indie music is selling more, and the one area of commercial music that’s remained popular is “American Idol,” where you can’t fake it (unless you’re Paula Abdul).
The producers speak
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”
Craig Anderton, a producer and music writer, observes that Auto-Tune “gets no respect because when it’s done correctly, you can’t hear that it’s working.
“If someone uses it tastefully just to correct a few notes here and there, you don’t even know that it’s been used so it doesn’t get any props for doing a good job,” Anderton notes. “But if someone misuses it, it’s very obvious — the sound quality of the voice changes and people say ‘Oh, it’s that Auto-Tune — it’s a terrible thing that’s contributing to the decline and fall of Western music as we know it.”
One producer who dislikes Auto-Tune is Jon Tiven, who cut his musical teeth in the punk rock era with his band the Yankees, and went on to produce soul singers Wilson Pickett and Don Covey as well as Pixies founder Frank Black. Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing.
“I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says. “You could sacrifice on some levels, but it would seem to me one of the first things you would really be hard pressed to sacrifice is if the person could sing in tune or not.”
Street says the like or dislike of Auto-Tune largely comes down to aesthetics, and likens people’s feelings about listening to unnatural sounds with the way some people feel about unnatural body modifications, such as breast implants.
And that makes sense. After all, today we have models and actors whose faces and bodies were never intended by nature, reality TV that’s not real, and sports “heroes” whose strength comes from pills not practice. It’s totally understandable that the commercial pop world would embrace an unnatural aesthetic. Whether audiences will someday want pop singers who are first and foremost singers remains to be seen.
© 2013 msnbc.com. Reprints
It's rare that a performer can sing flawless vocals in one take. For proof, try listening to a live recording of your favorite band. Most likely, some of the vocals will all be a bit off -- maybe not by much, but just enough that they sound rough when compared to the studio version. Traditionally, studio engineers obtained clean, polished vocals on a song by making the artist record the vocals dozens of times -- then, they edited the best parts together. From Frank Sinatra to Tammi Wynette, laying down multiple vocal tracks in the studio was par for the course.
With Auto-Tune, engineers suddenly didn't need to rely on endless re-recordings to obtain perfect vocals. The singer's last note was a little flat? The engineer simply calls up the full performance on a computer screen and, using a mouse, digitally 'nudges' wrong notes into the right key.
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Engineers have been able to change the pitch of a singer's voice ever since magnetic tape was invented. All you have to do is record your voice onto a tape recorder and play it at a faster speed. The problem is, the trick leaves your voice with a high-pitched 'chipmunk' sound. The genius of Auto-Tune is that it can alter the pitch of your voice while still preserving its original quality of the overall recording. Using immense quantities of math, Auto-Tune is able to map out an image of your voice. Using that data, it can then tweak the pitch of your voice without doing too much damage to your voice's original tone and feeling.
The new program saved time and money, and, according to Hildebrand, it made for better music. Here's what Hildebrand told the Seattle Times in 2009:
'Before Auto-Tune, sound studios would spend a lot of time with singers, getting them on pitch and getting a good emotional performance. Now they just do the emotional performance, they don't worry about the pitch, the singer goes home, and they fix it in the mix' [source: Matson].
Within years, 95 percent of all Top 40 songs counted traces Auto-Tune in their production [source: Freeman]. Still, purists derided the software as 'cheating'; artists just weren't taking the time to record quality vocal tracks anymore. American singer-songwriter Neko Case summed it up in a 2006 interview: 'When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seriously' [source: Dombal].
Worse, Auto-Tune was also accused of filling pop music with attractive yet untalented singers. Only a few years before Cher's 'Believe,' the pop duo Milli-Vanilli had been charged with fraud after audiences discovered that the band's two members had actually been lip-syncing vocals performed by different musicians. Fearing a similar scandal, engineers took pains to disguise their vocal-correction footprints as much as possible.
Nexus vst download. Meanwhile, buried deep in the software was a setting known as the 'zero function.' One of the ways Auto-Tune makes its pitch-corrections sound natural is by putting small spaces of time in between notes. Just like a real human voice, the software will take a few milliseconds to gently ease from one note to the next. But Auto-Tune came with the option to reducing the space between notes to zero, thereby forcing the notes to change instantaneously from one to the other, giving the vocal track an eerie, computerized timbre.
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It was like using Photoshop to dial up a picture to 100 percent brightness. Sure, you could do it, but it would turn your image into a washed-out mess. Similarly, engaging the zero function would transform your vocal track into a clutter of warbly, sci-fi sounds. Surely, the engineers thought at Antares, nobody would ever need to use the zero function. Right?