As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.
Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.
One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)
He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.
Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."
Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o
what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.
I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.
Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.
And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:
- Heat Waves, Glass Animals
- Need to Know, Doja Cat
- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber
Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking.
Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.
It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...
Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.
Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.
It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.
> People actually want this.
I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.
Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.
All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.
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I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.
I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by...
But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget.
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It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface.
Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.
What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.
> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.
I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
The Monkees were more popular than the Beatles, but you'll never get the Mojo magazine audience to admit that.
Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.
Once you notice it, it is everywhere.
I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.
Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.
And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.
It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.
Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.
But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.
[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).
IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.
The go to software is Meloldyne. It's...crazy capable. It can even return single notes in polyphonic music.
Watch this from about the 3:00 mark on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s
(Note this video is very extreme editing, it absolutely possible (in fact easier) to use Melodyne in a way that sounds utterly natural)
Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.
And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character
In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.
My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.
We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.
Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.
Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.
He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
As opposed to the 1960s, when nearly every popular album was actually recorded by the Wrecking Crew, not whatever muppets happened to be on the cover.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk...
Not about autotune per se but about what makes a great singer is not the perfection of their voice but the imperfections, that make it recognizable.
Autotune irons out imperfections; so does the grid. A big problem of new music is it's too perfect, which makes it sound dead.
Photos of people now show a perfect, clear, soulless and uncanny skin. It is the same thing when I hear autotuned artists.
Whether GP’s thesis has merit, I have no idea.
You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?
>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.
It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.
>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.
My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.
::pregnant pause::
Him: Ouch... My youth.
To be fair, "Old Town Road" is sort of both.
There is even research showing the variations in timing follow large macro cycles.
None of this is random or mistakes when we are talking about high level players.
Some is deliberate. Some is totally unconscious.
But not mistakes.
It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
I am highly skeptical of this assertion.
People can burrow into a specific small set of bands and music styles and never ever need to move outside of it now.
It's seems quaint that 20 years ago my primary source of new music was SNL and late shows.
Now, spotify/pandora will give you entry to exactly what you want and keep giving it to you, forver.
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."