Arghh - autotune

[JustJones]

Should have just gone with gold instead of green.

 

[CapMan]

What the world needs -- is Tom Waits, autotuned.

The numbing sameness of the sound of so many current pop stars/acts is distressing (to me) to hear. And, yes, I realize, that homogeneity isn't strictly due to processing, but rather the old adage imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Exactly this Sir.

The thing is it is really hard to unhear autotune!

 

[kemmler3D]

Autotune was originally designed to assist in the sonar mapping of seabeds for the mining industry. The inventor was not a musician, so you can't blame him. I don't believe he had any "intentions" on how the tool should be used and was astonished to see the creative ways it was adopted.

Musicians always use things in unexpected ways. That's the prerogative of the artist.

Thankfully there is an almost unlimited amount of recorded music available to us, and I would guess that 95% of it is not autotuned, so it seems a little mean-spirited to complain about it.

Turns out a lot of this is an urban legend, although I would have said the same before googling it. He did work in oil exploration but the work was separate - and he was a professional musician at one point! https://www.vice.com/en/article/bma...e-and-changed-music-forever-interview-creator

 

[Mynice]

Turns out a lot of this is an urban legend, although I would have said the same before googling it. He did work in oil exploration but the work was separate - and he was a professional musician at one point! https://www.vice.com/en/article/bma...e-and-changed-music-forever-interview-creator

There are other, later interviews much more complete that the one you linked to so I wouldn't describe what I wrote as "urban legend".

The point is, he developed the algorithms for the mining industry then adapted them to music. .

 

[Curvature]

Edited for accuracy IRL.

I think many people sincerely love the throaty, inarticulate midrangey voice that's currently fashionable. Singers and listeners both. ...and the success that comes with it.

 

[Mynice]

There is a song that was Billboard #1 for weeks back in the summer, "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony Music, which supposedly is recorded with a single microphone. It's just him singing with a guitar, classic country/folk political protest song, another link in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan-Bruce Springsteen chain that the critics now sometimes call Americana. He was right up there on the charts with Taylor Swift, SZA, Drake, all the auto-tune pop stars, despite not having a record label. Or even a record, he was releasing on YouTube.

It sounded as pure and simple as a recording as you will hear anywhere, could have been out of the 1950s. Well, maybe the 1970s, there is no tape hiss and it's a clean recording, good dynamic range. But my point is, you can find music that is relatively unprocessed even today, even on the Billboard Hot 100, if you look for it.

Jack White obsesses about this sort of stuff. He even rebuilt a field recording unit from the 1920s and recorded a bunch of current music stars with it. It's like 2 minutes of pure analog, pre-transister vacuum tube 1-take audio, zero processing, single microphone cut direct to disk audio goodness, and you can buy it on vinyl if you want to hear the least processed music you can get. He has a whole series of direct-to-disk LPs, mostly indie stars, that he records live in his Nashville or Detroit record stores.

So, it's out there if you dig.

 

[fpitas]

I think many people sincerely love the throaty, inarticulate midrangey voice that's currently fashionable. Singers and listeners both. ...and the success that comes with it.

Someone must like it, I guess. But I'm sure it gets tossed into most pop songs as an obligatory thing.

 

[ta240]

Someone must like it, I guess. But I'm sure it gets tossed into most pop songs as an obligatory thing.

It was once something made fun of because back then you mostly heard it when actors wanted to sing in their movies or the younger one-hit-wonders cranked out a song with it. Now I hear it on so many tracks from really popular people that I wonder if their fans really like something about it. Or maybe they've just been conditioned to expect the voices to sound like that.

 

[mhardy6647]

John Mellencamp took an interesting approach to recording an album a few years back, using an Ampex 600 (or 601) tape recorder & a "1940s microphone".

https://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/john-mellencamp-no-better-than-here/Content

EDIT: OK, the mic looks like an RCA 77D or similar.

This photo from the link above does show the 8" Ampex monitor speaker (Usually a JBL fullrange, maybe D208?) & amplifier.

Here's an Ampex 600 being operated by my father ca. 1957.

 

[beeface]

I personally don't mind when autotune is cranked to 11 and used as an instrument in itself. To me it's not too dissimilar to a vocoder.