Entertainment For Lively Minds
Autotune makes me want to smoke crack*
* with apologies to Beck
I just heard a new song by Michel Buble on the radio. I'm not exaggerating here, it actually made me feel slightly queasy - not figuratively, literally. The song is inoffensive enough; it's the vocal that is so nauseating. It's been heavily treated, and one of the treatments is autotune (at least I'm 99% sure that's what it is). It has a weirdly horrible effect, far, far worse than someone singing out of tune. And as I type this, another heavily autotuned song is playing - turns out it's Beyonce.
I can't be alone in wishing that someone could come along in the middle of the night and wipe every single goddam autotune application from every computer in the world. Apart from a very small number of records on which autotune is used creatively (Imogen Heap, Supper Furry Animals' Juxtaposed With U), it's a blight. It makes any singer sound inhuman and robotic; it removes nuance, elision, the very soul of the singer. It's EVIL!!
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I like the idea
of being able to confidently say, "Ugh, autotune!" It would make me look cleverer and more culturally savvy than I really am. So how can you tell?
Not entirely sure either, but
Think of Cher doing "Believe".
Or Victoria Beckham doing anything. As if they are through a vocoder.
(You may be forgiven for not remember any of Posh's oeuvre.)
Doubtless someone will tell us more elegant examples.
But Ad
It allows talentless bimbos (of both genders) to get out their Perla and become pop stars. Lots of people here seem to like it. I don't.
Queasy...yes!
I had that Wogan fella on the radio this merry morning, and I too suffered Mickey Buble's latest. I don't claim to know anything about autotune, but the song did - again, we're talking literally - make me feel slightly ill.
I'm not entirely sure what it is; the song plinkety-plonks along in a sort of jaunty primary school piano fashion, and it's just vile. To be fair to Buble: he does have a decent voice, but the whole production and treatment of the song induces kidney stones.
I actually urge people to listen to it, and you'll see what I mean. And this isn't easy-target bashing - I've nothing against Buble at all, it's the production that...I must lie down now.
Vocoder
Is that the one that sounds like a drowning robot ? Baffles me how some people can like this shite and slag off Van Der Graaf Generator,
but it's a broad church.
Well, because it might be horrible...
but at least they keep it short.
Vocoder Vs Autotune
Nothing to do with each other. And if you think you are scared now, wait until the use of the new version of Melodyne becomes commonplace (go to about 1'52 for the proper demo of things)
Autotune (made by Antares) seems to have ended up like Hoover (actually a vacuum cleaner) or Tannoy (actually a public address speaker) in that it's just one product, but lots of other things can do the same job. You could make something sound over-Autotuned in Garageband if you really wanted to.
Like lots of other things, people had actually been re-tuning vocals manually for years but it was such a long process that most people didn't bother. You could either shift lines up or down a few cents (100ths of a semitone) and compile them to create a new take, or send individual lines of a vocal out to a sampler to re-pitch them from a keyboard or with pitch bend (the little wheel/joystick on the left side of some keyboards) then re-record them on the multitrack.
Antares came up with a system for doing this automatically by detecting the incoming pitch then altering it to fit a specific scale. I find Melodyne easier to use because you can fix little things subtly without messing with the stuff that is perfectly acceptable to listen to without being treated.
That Buble thing..
I've been meaning to post about it. Azeem's right - it sounds horrific. Synthesized in the sense of being synthetic. Is this the way vocals are going? Will people expect everything to sound like this in the same way that they expect all film SFX to be CGI'd?
Presumably, Dr Yang's Melodyne needs to run on an industrial mainframe run directly off the National Grid when Mrs Beckham's getting her vocals sorted?
me too
It also makes me feel ill, to the extent that I actually have to walk out of shops where there is autotuned music playing. I thought I was the only one who felt physically affected by it.
I have a very good ear for pitch. Evidently this is a curse because I can spot even the smallest bit of vocal tuning. Over-pitched music is actually worse than out-of-tune.
Vocal tuning sounds either like a car horn, or someone gargling digital water, if that helps. Listen to the start of a word in a vocal line, if it sounds 'stepped' then that's autotune.
Just a thought..
How would Kirsty McColl, who sung everything a fraction flat, have sounded with digital manipulation? Ditto Dido? Presumably, you can set the pitch control where you like..
Yep you could do that
You could make everything flat if you wanted to. You can also change the amount of time that it takes before it starts operating - that Cher. T-Pain effect is if you turn the reaction time down to 0, but if you set it sensibly it can be relatively subtle.
Some people use it to fake double tracking by making a copy of a backing vocal and pitch correcting one but leaving the other as it was.
I've used it on some ethnic wind instruments that weren't quite made to the highest orchestral standards so that they don't sound completely wrong on top of equal-tempered instruments. Also you can apply vibrato to something that doesn't normally have vibrato.
I think that Dido
probably used autodetune, autobland and maybe even autowordcover.
I was going to post about this too
when I heard it last week but bottled out, partly because I thought how can someone who's made their name as a 'proper singer' rely on it so much?
That said I don't know much about him and am probably happier that way.
I've not had the "pleasure"
of hearing Mickey Bubble's latest effort, but I have sat through Cheryl Cole's latest release, and that's another overly processed slice of mechanically recovered robo-meat. There are some thoughts on it here: http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/help-old-man-befuddled-modern-pop
The conclusion of that thread
appeared to be, "it is the way pop music is these days, so what" which gives me another reason to rejoice in not liking pop music.
Misfortune
I had the shocking bad luck to hear the new Michael Bolton song recently - it's over-everythinged:
Over-emoted
Over-sugary
Over-tuned
Horrid.
Michael Bolton ? Going nuclear now are we ?
Whatever his new one is like it can't be any worse than this horror.
Listen first to Domingo hit the notes, in place, and then to MB.
is auto tuning not just the next step
it started with one take live recording
then multi tracking and overdubbing
True
But the main problem people have with it is that it sounds so horrible when it's done badly. This seems to show up worst when producers try to make something half decent out of someone who really can't sing...
I would like to release a record
which explicitly addresses my hatred of autotune. I would like to use autotune on that record, however.
Probably the best use of
a prototypical autotune effect was by Morrissey, who provided his own pinky/perky backing vocals in the name of Ann Coates on the "The Queen Is Dead" and "Bigmouth Strikes Again".
Not quite the same thing
My understanding is that a vocoder is (usually) used to effect a much more drastic change: rather than "tweaking" a note to bring it from flat or sharp to on the button, a vocoder is used to shift the pitch completely, typically going up or down an octave or even more. David Bowie (let's see if that dog whistle attracts Sheev...) used this in 1966 on The Laughing Gnome, and later on The Bewlay Brothers and Fame, to name but two.
I think the lead Pointer Sister used one to lower the pitch of her voice on Automatic.
Vocoder
Mavis called it - what you are talking about involves changing the speed of the tape in some way either running it fast to record then at normal speed it will sound slower and lower at normal speed, or running it slowly to record then it sounds faster and higher at normal speed. Prince uses that trick a lot when doubling vocals.
A vocoder... is something else altogether. It's a bunch of filters (a little bit like a lengthy graphic EQ) where the volume of each filter is controlled by some other sound. The sound going in is the carrier and the sound you use to control it is the modulator.
So for example if you strings through a vocoder as the carrier and use someone singing as the modulator it sounds as if the strings are forming words. And there you have a favourite trick of ELO's. If you use a synth holding one note as the carrier and an actor speaking as the modulator then you get the voice of a Cylon from the 70s Battlestar Galactica.
A vocoder isn't the same as a talkbox (think Framptom Comes Alive), and it's not the same as a harmoniser (which pitch-shifts the vocal up or down to make harmonies as on Hide & Seek by Imogen Heap).
Here is a video of someone showing off a classic vocoder.
varispeed
That must have been done by running the tape at a slow speed and overdubbing vocals. That's the old way of doing pinky and perky voices.