Entertainment For Lively Minds
X Factor - is she or isn't she?
Posted by David Rothon on 22 August 2010 - 5:24pm.
Getting a bit of 'help' from autotune, that is. If the answer's yes, surely that's pretty outrageous? I've seen it suggested elsewhere that she is, and it certainly sounds like it. What does anyone else think?
(NB the fact that The X Factor is the devil's work etc etc etc can be taken as read).
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X factor
Truly scary.
Having despaired of the profligate use, on chart-shit 'singers', of that autotuning doohickey that makes a change of note sound like they've just slipped on a stair, I was utterly appalled to hear the same effect used on at least three of the auditionees. They'd not yet even had the chance to prove that they couldn't sing and Smugs Cowell was already processing the poor sods...
It's probably to give them the sound du jour.
Lots of the processed vocals out there would probably sound absolutely fine but the Autotune sound is currently in vogue so it gets slapped on everything. I was horrified to hear the sublime tones of Mary J. Blige being sullied in this way.
It is, hopefully, a passing fad.
Bad at popular music...........
.........if she's on X Factor she is, and my guess is her parents probably were as well.
I quite enjoy X Factor actually.
Much more fun than yer average miserable 'alt country' shite.
???????????????
Fuck off !!
Oh dear Jack
you're so naughty.
Ouch!
It's OK, I won't take it personally…
Forget autotune
can someone give her some autocharisma ?
Vaseline on the lense
I understand that some young singers have actually started imitating the side effects of auto-tune just because it's on all the songs that they are hearing.
But that was clearly autotune in use live, and I'm at a complete loss as to why they would do that in a talent show; it'd be like someone having live photoshop work done in a modelling competition (or perhaps just rubbing vaseline on the lense).
Anyway, it makes even more of a mockery of the whole thing - they can fix the pitching if it's off, so why not pick someone who is actually interesting in some kind of way.
They must be mad.
Autotune will go all over the place - as demonstrated, if the vocal isn't close to the pitch or key it's supposed to be sung in.
I noticed it when the scary woman was doing her mad woman at the bus stop version of Mercy.
It is actually possible to use Autotune and nobody be able to tell, if you use it subtly in graph mode.
I thought my ears were going mad until I saw this thread....
....I sat and watched it last night and several singers sounded like they had something going on with their voices. Very weird.
Thanks for making me realise my ears are fine after all.
It definitely does sound like it
and in fact they've got it cranked up so much you can hear that distinctly robotic tone so clearly.
I hate the Autotune. I f**king hated it from the moment I heard that bloody annoying Cher record. I don't get upset about a lack of 'authenticity' or using FX to soup things up (I dare say reverb, echo and chorus etc are used live by most singers) but I just hate the sound of Autotune because it's so unsubtle and colours the vocal so much. It's so ubiquitous Radio 1 probably put 'Newsbeat' through it nowadays.
I have no problem with X Factor, it's an easily ignored bit of light entertainment in a long tradition of Opportunity Knocks, New Faces blah blah but I do hope this does cause a bit of a furore in the tabloids (does seem to have already). I would like the Autotune debate out in the open and I hope the young 'uns rebel against it and stop (no doubt aging coke addled record producers) layering it over everything.
Auto tune is ok
well only on this song for me
Now I've watched the clip..
Bloody hell. That's dreadful. Why are people standing and applauding? Shouldn't they be looking on in aghast silence or throwing things?
How does this work? As I understand it, ProTools and similar use some doohickey or another to manipulate a recorded vocal to a specific melody-line. The degree of smoothness between notes can be manipulated to avoid the pitch-jumpy effects in the clip above, an effect no human voice could reproduce.
The clip, however, is a live vocal. Is she singing to a pre-arranged track to which her vocal will be shifted in real-time and decides to go for a bit of non-official melisma (There it is! Finally got to use the word in a post!) which confuses the machine or is she off-tempo, causing similar problems as the machine searches for a best-match, has she lost her foldback with the volume of the cheers and screams, is there a keyboard player trying to play as she sings to give the melody-line and he loses the plot or is she just a shit singer?
Yes she was
She was using it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11056050
Oh purlease!
What sort of an excuse is that? Why does the number of microphones being used mean they need to auto-tune her vocal? She's got a microphone in front of her mouth presumably that picked up her vocal?
I'm glad lots of people noticed. They never learn ITV do they?
It should go without saying that I adore music.
Why else would I be posting on here.That's why I never have and never will watch The X-Factor.Pompous,probably,do I care,not a jot.Why waste precious time listening to third rate singers,Auto Tuned or not,when you could be listening to REAL talent.Like this.
Painfully obvious...
My 16 year old daughter spotted it straight away, using ears that are accustomed to hearing autotune. They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel now.
PETER SELLERS SAW IT COMING
Prophetic stuff From 1957....
I have no time for X Factor at all...
...but I thought that was great.
F*ck f*cking auto-f*cking-tune...
What possessed them to mess with the perfectly serviceable lyrics of a more that adequate pop song?
Does Cowell get a writer's credit if he f*cks with other people's lyrics?
Apparently the lady who performed
her own special areangement of 'Mercy' in the manner of someone with mental problems may be barred from continuing in the series after it was revealed 'she has a history of mental illness'
Shame when the freakshow gets derailed by these pesky medics
The world of Rock and Pop
would be a much poorer place if singers with "a history of mental illness" were not allowed to perform.
Of course during the audition process it's Ok to poke fun at what are often people with varying degrees of personality disorder, delusion and eccentricity bordering on mental illness, and parade them in from of the cameras for cheap saturday night laughs.
Was it Ricky Gervais who described it as (more or less)
X-Factor; the mentally inadequate queuing up to be laughed at by multi-millionaires.
Bill Bailey
has twittered that the judges are using another piece of software: AutoMorph. They are, in reality, a coypu, a dugong, a gulper eel and a sea-cucumber. Now, which one's which...
Conspiracy theory alert!
Now that Dr Ev… sorry, Simon Cowell has 'jetted into the UK' and decreed there will be no more Autotune on the X-Factor, it's hard not to conclude that the whole affair was a neatly contrived bit of publicity for the new series. After all, who could possibly believe that Cowell was ignorant of its use prior to this?
Hmm.
"After all, who could possibly believe that Cowell was ignorant of its use prior to this?"
Er.. Me.
What Cowell knows about music could be written on the back of a postcard in 80pt type. He wouldn't recognise a manipulated vocal if it were dangled in front of him.
C'mon, He may not be familiar with the work of Nick Drake
but he knows mainstream Pop music inside and out and I'm sure he is fully versed in Autotune and will no doubt have asked a producer to use it to sweeten a vocal or two in his time. Like Larry Parnes, Mickie Most before him he knows what will sell to kids, and their grandparents and how to sell it to them. It takes some talent and knowledge to do that, it can't all be down to good luck otherwise anyone could go out and pick a pretty boy with half a voice and get him to sing 'Unchained Melody' and have a massive hit...errrr.
My point exactly..
Cowell is a fantastic businessman and salesman with an incredibly well-tuned eye for a market but I'd still say he knows nothing about music itself.
Marina's take on this
Us per, Marina Hyde knows exactly where to point her laser-guided wit. Read all about it here.