• Autotune Is Bad
• Why Autotune Is Bad
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The following sentence might come as a huge shock to teens and Millennials, so stop tweeting for a second, kids, and get prepared for a totally outlandish statement. Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers.

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Yes, I know. That’s hard to comprehend since the pop charts are now dominated by artists who use Auto-Tune, the software plug-in that corrects the pitch of those who can’t really cut it in the vocal department and turns their vocals into robo-voices. While everyone under 30 recovers from that revelation, here’s what I mean by “actual singers.”

Back in the day, pop artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles used to be able to record albums in just a few days. Country musicians like Patsy Cline and George Jones trudged through grueling tours in out-of-the-way rural locales yet still missed nary a note. R&B musicians like the Supremes and the Four Tops navigated their way through complex choreography but still belted out songs out like their lives depended on it.

Before we get into this controversial subject of just how bad a singer you have to be to use auto tune, we might first explain exactly what auto tune is and how it works. It’s worth while explaining this to understand why it’s used by people who would normally sound like a cat that’s having its tail pulled. Jun 02, 2009 Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing. “I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says.

And while today, we still have singers with massively impressive pipes, a whole lotta them could never have rocked it for real like the Motown gang. These days, artists are able to get by on looks, publicity and aid from Auto-Tune.

You can hear the robotic, processed sound of the plug-in on recent hit records like “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga and “Right Now (Na Na Na)” by Akon. It’s also heard on tracks by Kanye West, Britney Spears and Lil Wayne. When West attempted to sing “Love Lockdown” without the plug-in on “Saturday Night Live,” the results were none too impressive and got ridiculed online. You can hear 10 examples of “Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music” on Hometracked, a blog geared toward home recording enthusiasts.

Paula Abdul also uses Auto-Tune on her new song, “Here for the Music,” which she performed (i.e. lip-synched) on “American Idol” May 6. It was evident just how artificial Abdul’s vocals were when she was followed by Gwen Stefani, who gave a warts-and-all live vocal on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.”

Country and rock singers are said to use Auto-Tune to protect themselves from hitting bum notes in concert. Pop singers use it when they have a hard time singing while executing complicated dance moves (raising the question as to why they’re letting their dancing take precedence over their music). Auto-Tune has become so ubiquitous that indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to protest its overuse.

Building the ‘perfect’ beast
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.

The first of these can lead to inspiring moments, as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones noted in an essay last year. Pioneering voice tweakers include producer Quincy Jones, who punched up Lesley Gore’s vocals with double tracking on “It’s My Party,” and George Martin, who gave us a childlike sped-up John Lennon on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Later on, Peter Frampton wowed audiences with his talk box guitar effect and a decade later, vocals were being put through harmonizers to get jarring outer space effects.

Of course, to pull off any of those effects, you had still had to be able to sing. With Auto-Tune you don’t.

Then there’s the quest for perfection. By the 1970s, producers were able to edit or splice together vocal takes from various tracks and eventually they started to use hardware that corrected vocal pitch to create “perfect” performances. When the sound editing program Pro Tools became the industry norm in the 1990s, kludged-together vocal tracks became the norm.

But too much meticulousness in pop music strips away passion. And the very reason we listen to music, noted the late rock critic Lester Bangs, is to hear “passion expressed.” Auto-Tune makes people sound like robots. And if there’s no feeling, why listen at all?

Some people apparently aren’t listening anymore. Sales of major label CDs are down. But more authentic sounding music still has fans. Paste magazine recently reported that indie music is selling more, and the one area of commercial music that’s remained popular is “American Idol,” where you can’t fake it (unless you’re Paula Abdul).

The producers speak
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”

Craig Anderton, a producer and music writer, observes that Auto-Tune “gets no respect because when it’s done correctly, you can’t hear that it’s working.

“If someone uses it tastefully just to correct a few notes here and there, you don’t even know that it’s been used so it doesn’t get any props for doing a good job,” Anderton notes. “But if someone misuses it, it’s very obvious — the sound quality of the voice changes and people say ‘Oh, it’s that Auto-Tune — it’s a terrible thing that’s contributing to the decline and fall of Western music as we know it.”

One producer who dislikes Auto-Tune is Jon Tiven, who cut his musical teeth in the punk rock era with his band the Yankees, and went on to produce soul singers Wilson Pickett and Don Covey as well as Pixies founder Frank Black. Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing.

“I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says. “You could sacrifice on some levels, but it would seem to me one of the first things you would really be hard pressed to sacrifice is if the person could sing in tune or not.”

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Autotune Is Bad

Street says the like or dislike of Auto-Tune largely comes down to aesthetics, and likens people’s feelings about listening to unnatural sounds with the way some people feel about unnatural body modifications, such as breast implants.

And that makes sense. After all, today we have models and actors whose faces and bodies were never intended by nature, reality TV that’s not real, and sports “heroes” whose strength comes from pills not practice. It’s totally understandable that the commercial pop world would embrace an unnatural aesthetic. Whether audiences will someday want pop singers who are first and foremost singers remains to be seen.

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In my last post, I talked about how T-Pain was the most influential artist of our generation. You may or may not have agreed but hopefully you were at least exposed to a new perspective on this topic. T-Pain essentially began the huge trend of autotune filled music that we see filling up a large part of our music (mainly hip-hop/rap) Today, I want to evaluate his influence. Has it lowered the expectations for how talented modern day artists need to be?

This is the main question that arises when people contemplate autotune’s impact on the music industry. In most cases, I don’t think autotune is actually able to override the important of actual artistic talent. An artist really does have to have a creative spark or simply talented. If this wasn’t the case, wouldn’t anyone who has a passion for music rise to stardom?

Let’s take a look at various artists in the industry. will.i.am is an interesting example. This artist’s voice is rather average (for a lack of a better term). If you have heard him without autotune, you might really think he’s just another guy singing. Not bad, but also not that good. So why is he famous? It’s his artistic talent and creativity. will.i.am has a very unique sound and vision for his music. He truly goes the extra mile to make sure that the production of all his music has a particular sound, and that the music videos for his songs are radiating a modern vibe. Take a look for yourself!

This applies to a lot of artists. Take a look at Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak. Kanye’s voice is not particularly good either, but his creativity and concepts that he brought out on this album made this a groundbreaking record. This album made Rolling Stone’s list of 40 most groundbreaking albums of al time. Autotune was used all over this album, but that didn’t necessarily reduce the creativity or artistry behind the music!

Chances are that if an artist reaches a point of popularity by using autotune (and completely lacks creativity/artistry), it is by luck and won’t last long. People easily discover “fake” artists, and love to expose them. You might remember Rebecca Black from 2011. Here’s a reminder of her work incase you forgot!

Black used autotune extensively, and her lack of true talent resulted in a complete annihilation of this song in the mainstream view. The production is also rather bad, and the autotune is not used with good synthesis. Friday was also essentially the only popular song that Rebecca Black made, and it can be seen how autotune cannot make up for a lack of artistry.

Autotune also inspired artists like Future, Desiigner, Travis Scott, Young Thug, Lil Yatchy etc. These artists along with various other’s have formed a new sound in music known as Trap. The vocals don’t sound like anything meaningful and the words are hard to discern. These lyrics are recorded over a beat with a deep moaning bass and shimmering hi-hats. This new sound has gathered a new following, and while it is gaining popularity, a majority of music listeners still disregard this music because it is “trashy” and “lacks creativity”.

Why Autotune Is Bad

But is this really talentless music? I think the idea of “talent” in music in itself is very subjective. What might sound creative and novel to one person, might sound absolutely awful to another (as seen in the case of Trap Music). When it comes to the use of autotune, it is important to draw the line between talentless music and unconventional music . Trap, for example, would fit in the category of unconventional because it is exploring a new sound that hasn’t existed until fairly recently. However, this different sound still has an authentic sense of creativity in that it is exploring a new sound. The difference still lies in that the popularity of these artists is dependent on creativity, rather than their use of autotune.

Autotune Download

Let’s wrap all this up! Essentially, autotune has not enabled talentless artists to reach success in music. For an artists to be successful and/or pioneer in sound, he or she must depend greatly on the creative aspects of their music rather than autotune. The autotune is only ever used as something that complements the creativity.