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Arghh - autotune

mhardy6647 said:
Well... there was Cher.



That same Cher who now has the distinction of having had a hit record in each of seven decades.
I report, you decide.
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I don't mind this kind of use of auto tune (even if I dont like that song) where its obviously used as an effect. Using it to correct bad singing is another storey. And using it to make a great singer sound perfect, taking away any character is the worst. Its like using autotune on Jeff Becks guitar to get rid of any wammy.
 
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It revived her career when she heard the plugin effect and insisted on using it. Then her big hits with it followed and all kinds of people using it now. Before she was doing Home Shopping Channel pitching items.
antcollinet said:
Anyone heard Cher’s Christmas single? Awful. Still at nearly 80 at least she has an excuse for not being able to sing.
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Liya said:
Yes, you are right about them using autotune live. It is hopless.
Well, they are hopeless.
And 'older music, classical and jazz' is quite precise description of my music library.
Classical and jazz, I listen to, is almost exclusively instrumental, so no problem here and with my 'older music', I don't think they used autotune back then ;)
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One of the thing that kept me from listening to opera is singers' pitch control. A lot of flute music too.
 
CapMan said:
I wonder if this awful tool might be even more detrimental to musical enjoyment than the overuse of dynamic compression.

Once you’ve heard that synthetic, robotic twang on a singer’s voice there’s no going back. Even in moderation you can hear it - what’s the point of loosing the natural voice to some air brushed facsimile .

I had the Andrea Bocelli family Christmas album on (don’t judge me) and his son sounds like a Michael Buble clone.

I’m going to stick to old jazz LPs as I know the singers were actually singing unaided , the drummers could play good time and feel without a click track and the band could play together live with appropriate dynamics .

Rant over - happy Christmas
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Autotune is the surest way to make me unfollow anything. If you need it, you should not be anywhere as a singer. Please. Unlistenable crap from untalented pretenders.
 
Turns out the creator of autotune put the robotic sounding feature in the product on a whim... talk about the butterfly effect... one off-handed comment at a dinner and one "what the hey" and boom, music is ruined forever. ;)

And apparently the rumor of it having been derived from signal processing software for seismic oil exploration is incorrect.

www.vice.com

How an Oil Engineer Created Auto-Tune and Changed Music Forever

An interview with the revolutionary audio processor's inventor Andy Hildebrand.
www.vice.com www.vice.com

When did you realize that method could be used to correct a singer's pitch?
Around 1995 I was at a trade show, it was me and a couple partners, and we were with a person who was distributing our products. His wife was there, and we were talking about what products would be interesting to do next. His wife said, "Well, Andy, why don't you make me a box that would have me sing in tune?" I looked around at the table, and everyone just stared at their lunch plates, they didn't say a word.
So I thought, "boy, that's a lousy idea." About eight or nine months into the year, I'd gone to work for a different project, and I came back to that idea, I said, "you know, that's pretty straightforward to do, I'll do that." At the same trade show a year later I had producers ripping it out of my hands.
Was it ever bothersome to you that people seemed more interested in the synthetic, "discretized" sound, rather than how you intended the technology to be used?
Well, my emotional response was more surprise [laughs]. When I first heard the Cher song, my reaction was more like, "She did that?"
That's how I felt when I heard it too.
I almost didn't put that feature in the software, but I was told, "Why not, you know? It won't hurt." So that's how it got to be.
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It won't hurt, huh??????
 
It strips the very essence of the human voice away.

Might be the single biggest reason to go back to old vinyl which you can at least be certain hasn’t been messed around with.

Thing is - with generative AI it is only going to get worse. It will mess with everything, way faster and way cheaper and with more scale than any human producer.

Hang onto your old music media !

I also worry about our kids out there who aspire to be musicians - trying to live up to some software enhanced, fake facsimile of singing or whatever…

If you can stand it take a listen to the Bocelli family Christmas . Senior sounds ok , but the daughter and son - hmmm!

Music should be honest - that’s a fundamental.
 
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Imagine it’s like MQA :(

“we want you to hear the music as the artist intended, so our proprietary AI has isolated the vocals and given them the polish, only possible with the latest tech”
 
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Anton D said:
Doesn’t auto tune measure as more accurate?
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Yes, if used like the designer originally intended. Used the way it usually is now, no way.
 
fpitas said:
The designer claims (and I have no reason to disbelieve him) that it was intended for minor tweaks after the fact to clean up a track that might otherwise have to be redone. Obviously, someone cranked the knob to 11, and here we are.
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Correct, originally intended to correct pitch on the track.
Then bastardized beyond belief.
 
kemmler3D said:
In truth you've probably heard a lot of autotune without realizing it. It's just that the recognizable use is very objectionable after a while.
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I find that even the intended use case is easy to hear on a few newer albums I’ve listened to. It’s a synthetic, unnatural quality on voices. It’s even worse when it’s used on harmonies and applied to multiple singers !

Sorry if we’re taking at cross purposes - when you say recognisable use do you mean “Cher - believe” or something else
 
kemmler3D said:
In truth you've probably heard a lot of autotune without realizing it. It's just that the recognizable use is very objectionable after a while.
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Absolutely, I was about to post something similar. "Autotune" is so good now, it's used in almost all commercial releases and with slight use it's nearly impossible to pick it up unless comparing to that exact singer singing without it. You're spot on though, when it's easy to be heard, it's very easy to pick... it's on purpose or the person is just terrible at singing. It's akin to airbrushing a picture, but for human singing. However its now being used as a desirable "effect"... in effect.


JSmith
 
CapMan said:
I find that even the intended use case is easy to hear on a few newer albums I’ve listened to. It’s a synthetic, unnatural quality on voices. It’s even worse when it’s used on harmonies and applied to multiple singers !

Sorry if we’re taking at cross purposes - when you say recognisable use do you mean “Cher - believe” or something else
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The intended use case is to correct the pitch with minimal work, and not have it affect the sound of the performance otherwise. If the producer is successful, you'll never know... but supposedly it's on basically every vocal recording nowadays. The only way to be sure it's not being used is to hear a bum note.

The less off-pitch the singer was in the first place, the less artifacts you'll get, so probably you only hear autotune when the singer is truly way off. In which case, what would you rather have? The original, unlistenable performance, or the corrected barely-listenable one? :D
 
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