Does every fucking rap album that comes out this year have to have at least one song on it wherein the artist uses a fucking auto-tune? Even people that have perfectly fine voices? I realize that the auto-tune is solely responsible for the absolute garbage that T-Pain calls a “music career”, but Kanye? Seriously? His new album, EVERY. FUCKING. SONG. Lil Wayne’s Dedication 3; one out of every two songs has Weezy cooing through an auto-tune.
It’s hard enough being a rap fan without the top artists jumping on a shitty bandwagon and running it even further into the ground.
Fuck you T-Pain. And fuck you too Antares Audio Technologies. And fuck all you unoriginal bastards that jumped on that shit.
It’s software or a device that corrects the pitch in human voice so it’s less human and more “precise”. Cher used it on “Believe” which is why her voice sounds so weird.
More commonly referred to as a vocoder, the effect is indeed fucking horrific, and massively overused. I heartily endorse this pitting, doubly so if we can round up a posse to go round and TP Cher’s house.
It’s getting ridiculous, especially in the case of Kanye and Lil Wayne. Both are making the best music of their careers, but instead of expanding and moving on and possibly bringing in new rap fans, they stagnate the industry by relying on pitch correction software.
Wayne is going to remembered as one of the greatest to ever rap, and his auto-tune phase will be remembered as his lowest point.
To this: after Cher’s song, you didn’t see a glut of pop stars using this technology. But after T-Pain started making his carbon copy club anthems, and guest appearing on every single rap album released this year, rappers have decided that pitch correction is what sells records and have begun using it en masse.
Music is becoming more and more a collection of sound effects set to a rhythm track. I recently heard a Brittany Spears song “Piece of Me” that uses this effect a LOT and thought that it actually sounded quite appealing (god help me I’m 44 years old). Not sure I’d call it music, though.
From what I understand, it’s primarily to be used for times when you’re just a little sharp or flat on a note. It can then correct that pitch to the right note. The use of auto-tune that I’ve heard in several tracks was used to over-correct to the point that it sounds inhuman. It doesn’t bother me much but then I don’t hear it too often.
When you use a regular vocoder, you can completely replace the pitch of the vocals with a melody line. I did that in a remix I made and the vocals had a completely different melody than in the original track. So in that form, yes, you can make a horrible singer passable, but it won’t sound anything near human most of the time. It sounds like a synthesizer is singing.
A reknowned opera singer, Inva Mula (credited as Inva Mulla Tchako) sung the part. The references I found differ on what was done with her voice - the IMDb trivia section says that she claimed a human voice could not jump through the hoops Besson required (assuming for parts of the latter half of the song, as the first half is an aria from Lucia de Lammermoor), so he had her sing the notes separately and put them together electronically. The Wiki article says that in the special edition’s commentary, it was said that “her voice was not digitally altered”. I’m not sure where the truth lies.
So don’t buy their shit, then. Oh, yeah, I forgot, kids today steal all their music, anyway. So, don’t buy their lines of clothing/video games/phone cards or whatever the fuck the talentless, sold-out half-wits sell these days.
I’m definitely showing my age here, but there was a time when selling out was not cool, as in really, really, really unspeakably fucking lame. Take the fucking hooks out of your mouths and quit supporting sellouts.
First off, for anyone that wants a great primer on auto-tune, listen to thisNew Yorker audio piece by Sasha Frere-Jones. He talks about it, then actually demonstrates the effect on his own (terrible) singing voice.
Now, autotune, vocoders, and talkboxes are three distinctly different effects and processes that all have a somewhat similar effect. (The aforementioned clip goes into this)
Now, all of that aside, I think that people rapping through autotune is a pretty interesting effect and color. Especially in Weezy’s case, he’s applying hard pitch correction to otherwise unpitched vocals, and it’s very weird and interesting to hear the software try to force unpitched, rapped syllables onto coarse pitches - it’s weirdly robotic and glitchy, like a malfunctioning Stephen Hawking voicebox. Check out this track from the new mixtape - Wayne comes in at :43, rapping through auto-tune.
