Margasak – Maybe do something on the use of AutoTune, which seems rampant now. It was obvious, and intentionally so, on Cher’s “Do You Believe” but less subtle on J-Lo’s “Waiting For Tonight” – I was left wondering what was that metallic, too-crisp sheen on her voice. The Nashville folks producing artists like Faith Hill seem to have gone nuts with it. I wondered how Mary J. Blige got those nearly instantaneous synthesizer-like pitch changes, without a trace of a slur between notes. Metallica seems to have used it too. Why do singers no longer wish to sing? We’re not listening to human beings any more: we’re listening to computers.
This is especially jarring when paired with a video, such as Metallica's, where they simulate a live show, yet their vocals sound very un-live.
My intended note to Margasak continued:
They can rationalize this by saying most pop singers today already use a boatload of digital processing – what’s one more effect when singers’ voices are run through synthetic room reverbs, slapback echos and choruses (which in themselves may already help to hide some pitch inconsistencies)?...
Reverbs and delays aim to alter the sound and character of the
"room" around the singer, making you sound like you're in a cathedral or
a forest or whatever.
As a singer myself, I also have a problem with the gratuitous, excessive use of those effects, especially when used to mask lack of skill or beef up an otherwise thin, unremarkable voice.
Still, Autotune (or DPC) is on a different level than those effects, and even the previous pitch effects such as choruses and harmonizers. DPC alters the very character and timbre of the voice. That's in addition to its flattening of the natural pitch variations that make us sound real. The end product displays an eerie un-humanness.
Even with all those digitally faked environments -– even
if the singer had to do 20 takes to get it right -- at least we knew that when we listened to a
record, the notes were real: we still had one thing that we knew the singer was
actually doing. Now, we don't even have that to hang onto.
Another huge difference between today's digital solution to vocal mistakes (DPC) and yesterday's analog solution (doing it over until it was right): One of those solutions is also known as practice -- it actually makes you a better singer. The other doesn't. It allows you to be a lazy singer.
THIS IS NOT the first time I have impotently waved my fist and cursed the sonic plague of DPC here; I wrote this back in 08.
WHAT REMINDED ME, just now, to finally dig up and post thoughts I wrote several years ago, and a note I jotted over 20 years ago?
A video posted today by Rick Beato. Watch it. Beato is a prophet to today's lost musical generation.