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Arghh - autotune

Should have just gone with gold instead of green.

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mhardy6647 said:
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. :facepalm:
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Exactly this Sir.

The thing is it is really hard to unhear autotune!
 
Mynice said:
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.
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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
 
kemmler3D said:
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
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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. .
 
fpitas said:
Edited for accuracy IRL.
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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.
 
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.
 
Curvature said:
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.
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Someone must like it, I guess. But I'm sure it gets tossed into most pop songs as an obligatory thing.
 
fpitas said:
Someone must like it, I guess. But I'm sure it gets tossed into most pop songs as an obligatory thing.
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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.
 
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".

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

mellencamp-3-47.jpg


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. :)

 
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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.
 
Listened to Kacey Musgraves: Apple Music Live yesterday. The pitch correction was very obvious (Melodyne). The vocals sounded like they were pre-recorded, but it's not the same as on the album.

What are your thoughts on this?

I isolated the vocals and used the Vocal Pitch Monitor app (the same one Wing of Pegasus uses on his Youtube channel):

kacie musgraves apple music live pitch corrected.png


It's from the song Giver / Taker:



I have also attached a short recording (isolated vocals) from another song, Deeper Well.

Left channel: Apple Music Live
Right channel: Live from the Today Show 2024
 

Attachments

  • Kacie Musgraves Apple Music Live (left) Today show (right).zip
    1.3 MB · Views: 37
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levimax said:
Just like heavy compression, autotune is now expected for pop music ... even people that can sing use it. I think most younger pop fans would find a dynamic non autotuned recording to sound strange and unfamiliar. Luckily good quality recorded music has been around for 70+ years so it is possible to find the recording style you prefer.
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Like magic, isn't it? :)
 
There is still a lot of new music without autotune, but it will be more underground genres, not mainstream top 30 pop. This is a song from last year with the Italian singer Awa Fall and the UK producer Alpha Steppa. He refuses to use autotune on his productions, and only works with great singers like here.

 
I thought this was a super interesting video about use of autotune in production

 
The only always and fully acceptable use of autotune is on cats.


And if you want to sound like a robot, go full robot and actually use a vocoder.

 
Let's face it, mainsteam music has changed irrevocably. It's no longer about talent or musical ability but how you look and how you can be marketed and sold to a specific demographic. Svengali producers use autotune (and a myriad of other techniques) to overcome the inconvenience of their 'artists' not really being artists at all. They are really just performers.
 
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