The pain that Auto Tune spares us
Posted by David Hepworth on 5 March 2008 - 8:21pm.
Further to the recent discussion about why records sound the way they do on the podcast this extraordinary clip has come in illustrating what Enrique Iglesias sounded like when nobody pressed the magic switch.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
- More from David Hepworth.
- Login or register to post comments
ho ho ho
What a sad day for music.
A sad day indeed.
It's not everyday...
...that you find out you're a better singer than Enrique Iglesias.
The Spanish...
Shaun Ryder.
Shredded?
Are we sure this isn't a vocal equivilent of the Santeri Ojala guitar shreds?
That's just what I was wondering
His Wikipedia page claims it's fake.
Of course, the Wikipedia article might be made up instead...
I'd love to believe it
But the sound quality is too poor for this to be real. The singing is also too bad. I've heard some baaad singing, and it's not like this.
Shame, really.
Bad singing.
Are we back on the Hurricane Smith obit? So apallingly godawful bad it was good. (Well, actually that's stretching it)
Reason to disbelieve
1. Live in a TV studio? Wor Enrique? Don't think so. Enrique Iglesias always mimes on TV appearances, especially on cheapo daytime magazine-type programmes of the type that this appears to be, judging from the set.
2. Too risky to be real. It's one thing expecting a TV hairdresser to keep shtum about a celeb's wig, but quite another to arrive with a little box under your arm and say "give this to the sound guy, he'll know what to do". And he'd have to have brought his own, because the sound on most TV shows is very rudimentary indeed - EQ and reverb and, er, that's about it. No compression, gating or all the other typical gadgetry you'd find in a recording studio- including Autotune.
3. Sound quality. Assuming that he was insane enough to trust what he sounds like to some jobsworth audio engineer (who ultimately must have betrayed that trust by "bugging" the dry output from the mic), it would sound a lot better than that technically. This sounds for all the world like a bubble-pack webcam mic from a supermarket checkout. (If it was real, there'd also be more leakage from the playback monitors, I reckon.)
4. Crap singer? Yes, but at least he's had the balls to sing live alongside a rather good one. Here he is doing "Cielito Lindo" with Pavarotti. Definitely no Autotune here, because his pitch is anything but perfect, but it's certainly not that bad.
What about this?
I don't know if this is real or faked:
But it has the rign of authenticity. He can obviously sing a little bit. She obviously can't.
I'm intrigued now
Perhaps the best-known (and one of the first) songs in which Autotune/vocoder-type effects were used up-front was "Believe" by Cher. But she doesn't use the "magic box" when she performs it live - she just mimes to the original heavily treated parts of the vocal track. Watch this video. She clearly mimes to the original vocal for the verses, switching to live for the chorus and middle eight.
Does anyone know for sure of anyone who actually does use Autotune/vocoder effects live? I've fiddled with equivalent software and it's a very delicate effect indeed, with lots of variables to tweak and fine-tune to get the sound you're looking for. Could it be just too unstable to use with live vocals?
And if not even Cher - in a massive Las Vegas megaproduction in which she can control every last detail of what the audience gets to see and hear - is prepared to risk using the magic box live, is it reasonable to believe that Enrique Iglesias would when performing on some crappy TV show without his own engineers at the desk?
If...
She were to use the autotune live, wouldn't she need to to deliberately sing off key for the hardware to kick in and create the desired effect? I imagine Cher mimes to this bit because she can sing.
I reckon so
That jerky, almost yodelly effect happens because when a singer scoops up or down from one note to the next the machine shifts to the nearest pure note. You can exaggerate it to make it a feature of the final sound, as the producers of "Believe" did and Daft Punk have done, or you can attempt to minimise it, but, as you say, if someone is on the note, it's got nothing to do.
The mimed verses notwithstanding, I was pleasantly surprised by that video of Cher in the sections she sang live. Not many people could bound up and down a stage like that while dressed as a cyber-pineapple and still sing pretty damned well. Madonna certainly can't.
Not quite...
The way Cher (or her producers) are using Auto Tune in this song is to process a vocal that is probably fine in terms of pitch, and they are using the settings in a way that makes the tuning sound intentionally unnatural.
Normally you'd want the software to grab the note and move it slowly but firmly up or down to where it's meant to be. Set it up wrongly and it tugs the note straight away which gives that sort of stepped quality.
Auto Tune isn't a Vocoder
I think we need to clarify: Auto Tune and it's variants (I prefer Melodyne personally) are nothing whatsoever to do with vocoders. I tend to get a bit annoyed when I see people - often reviewers - talking about use of a vocoder when it's quite clearly something else. I know, I know, I'm an audio tech geek.
I'd imagine some guitarists get annoyed about the differences between a wah-wah pedal and talk-box.
As for Cher, the effect could be made to work live (using MIDI automation and all kinds of lovely things). It's quite possible that when they made the song in the first place they produced a version that could be used for live performances, which included the heavily processed lines in the backing track so that she didn't have to drag a rack of equipment around with her whilst doing the promo.
Good point but. . .
Cher was definitely miming to the original vocal track on the verses there and definitely singing the verses and middle eight live (Trust me; I made a mashup with the original acapella a while back, so I've heard the thing more times than is healthy for any human being.)
But, to get back to the original point, do you reckon the Enrique Iglesias clip was for real, Matt, or do you think he's just been "shredded" by some wag?
Wag
I reckon it was some wag. I'm no great fan of Enrique but he surely can't be that bad and the microphone did sound awful.
I do believe this one though:
I'm quite sure that someone on the technical side of that show "won't be working in this industry again."
If you posit that you can fix any tuning problems then doesn't that make the whole audition process of Pop Idol/ X-Factor thing a waste of time? (Oh, okay, more of a waste of time) Why not pick someone interesting looking or with a personality and fix any pitching problems in the studio.
Ouch.
Owww. Aaargh. Eeek! Urrrgh.
Toe curling...
Come on, tekkie guys, can someone dig out Robin Gibbs relatively recent excruciatingly poor showing at a big shindig (United Nations? Unesco? Something of that ilk) Whilst his voice was never necessarily a shining solo instrument, on this showing he even seemed embarrassed by the noise he made. Even his syrup was embarrassed.
CD:UK
I knew the monitor engineer who worked on the saturday morning show, and he was astonished by the number of turns who developed a cold between soundcheck and 'live' performance. For the record, The Beautiful South mime, and Ronan Keating insists on singing live. Who'd've thought?
Mime, all mime
I had it on very good authority that when Sir Cliff of Richford packed the Wembley Arena for a month solid some years back (1990, I think) an awful lot (read: all) of the performance was, shall we say, stored on a magnetic data retrieval system.
Why-oh-why must people (with nothing better to do, I might add) insist on telling such obvious lies?
Whether it's real or not...
...the man is a fool. Here's a bit of an interview that Enrique gave the Evening Standard Magazine several months back...
ES:What are your current projects? Enrique: I'm promoting my latest album, Insomniac...I played Live Earth in Hamburg and I saw An Inconvenient Truth. Now I want to get more involved with climate change.
Earlier in the interview...
ES:What are your extravagances? Enrique: I do have one main indulgence - my speedboat. It wastes a lot of gas but I love it.
Well that's one way to be involved.