Pitch correction software has applications from restoration and mix-rescue to outright distortion of a voice or instrument. I’ll discuss some of the more tasteful uses of these auto-tune tools (whether the original from Antares, or a variant like the free GSnap) below. But first I thought I’d highlight their misuse to illustrate the effects we usually try to avoid.
So, listen here to 10 of pop music’s most blatant auto-tune abuses:
If you’re unfamiliar with Auto-tune, and especially if you listen to much pop and rock, you might not hear it initially. When overdone, the effect yields an unnatural yodel or warble in a singer’s voice. But the sound is so commonplace in modern mainstream music that your ears may have tuned out the auto-tune!
The songs in this clip, in order, and the phrases most affected by auto-tuning to help you spot them:
Dixie Chicks – The Long Way Around – Noticeable on “parents” and “but I.”
T-Pain – I’m Sprung – Especially obvious on “homies” and “lady.”
Avril Lavigne – Complicated – Listen to “way,” “when,” “driving,” “you’re.”
Uncle Kracker – Follow Me
The whole vocal sounds strained, but especially the word “goodbye.”
Maroon 5 – She Will Be Loved – Listen for “rain” and “smile.”
Natasha Bedingfield – Love Like This – “Apart” and “life.”
Sean Kingston – Beautiful girls – “OoooOver” doesn’t sound human.
JoJo – Too Little Too Late – Appropriately, “problem” stands out.
Rascal Flatts – Life is a Highway
Every vocal, foreground and background, is treated, but “drive” in particular.
New Found Glory – Hit or Miss – “Thriller”, and every time Jordan sings “I.”
The Cher Effect
When used noticeably, an auto-tuner produces what most call “The Cher Effect“, named for her trademark sound in the song Believe*. (In essence, we named the effect like scientists naming a new disease after its first victim.) Treated this heavily, a vocal track sounds synthetic, and obviously processed.
But not all auto-tuning is so blatant. In the sample above, it’s harder to hear the pitch correction on Uncle Kracker and Avril than on T-Pain and Bedingfield.
Tasteful Uses
As with any tool, a little care can yield great results. Some simple things to keep in mind about pitch correction tools:
- Performance: Most importantly, an auto-tuner isn’t a shortcut to a perfect performance. If you can’t sing the song properly, no amount of post-processing will make it sound like you did. So when your pitch matters, and you don’t want to correct it with an effect, you’ll need to work on your performance until it’s right.
- Less is more: The fewer notes you correct, the less obvious your use of an auto tuner will be. Consider automating the plugin so it acts only when most needed.
- Graphical mode: If your pitch correction software offers a graphical mode (like Antares Auto-Tune and Melodyne,) learn how to work with it. The default “auto” modes are OK for basic corrections, but often produce noticeable yodeling.
- Backing vocals: In general, you can get away with more pitch correction on backing vocals than lead vocals.
- Outdated: Obvious vocoder-style autotuning is dated, and borders on kitschy. The synthetic warbling vocal sound marks songs as having come from a specific era, the same way gated-reverb on drums instantly places a song in the 1980’s. Remember: If you make the auto tuner obvious, people will say your song uses “the Cher effect.” Let this be a guideline.
Be sure it’s needed
Two songs have auto tuners on my mind today: Snoop’s Sensual Seduction (because of Anil Dash’s ruminations on the death of the analog vocoder,) and Natasha Bedingfield’s Love Like This, which I heard on the radio. In the former, the auto tuner is clearly a gimmick. But every time I hear Bedingfield’s song, I’m struck by the same question: Why do that to her voice?
She’s a fantastic singer, and once you’ve heard the song without the cheesy auto tuner effect, it’s hard to take the radio single seriously.
And there’s a lesson in that for home recordists, (even those of us who don’t write pop music,) which echoes the rule of mixing: If an effect significantly changes the sound of a track, especially one so important as the lead vocal, be sure that change improves the song before committing it to the mix.
See Also: The Rule of Mixing
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Tags: freeplugins, mixing
238 comments
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You have a good point about the misuse of autotune but i think in some examples you show the effect is actually done deliberate. Pop music sucks anyways for most part because most can’t sing at all
How is using Atuotune as a deliberate special effect on a vocal any different from using a wah-wah pedal or flanger on a guitar?
man this is funny how people point out T pain for Abusing Auto tone. really he revolutionized it and glamorized it. he knew how it sounded but he also knew it sounded good. he knew the computerized Harmony sounded good. but there are still dumb buts who dont get that at all. and think that he is a fake singer. but now look at all the people who cannot keep there hands of the affect now. but then again if you use auto tone to try to trick people into thinking you can sing then shame on you.
As far as artistic integrity goes or who should be a “musician”, I’m FAR FAR more impressed by the people who actually write the songs than whatever schmuck the music industry picks to perform them because they’re attractive looking. I have far more respect for artists who write and perform their own music than ones that have some hit maker write the songs for them. I’d take a less than perfect vocal and even a less than perfect performance over what amounts to a form of fraud. I may like Belinda Carlisle and I make like her voice, but I don’t pretend she’s responsible for the songs that she performs that I like. Look in your album notes and see who really wrote the music. Song writers aren’t always vocalists, but in this commercial world, presence and appearance are often placed as more important than actual talent.
I take issue with the person that said that if you cannot sing you should not be a musician. Since when is music limited simply to the lead singer or backup vocalists? There are some great guitar players that sing for squat, but you’re suggesting we’d be better off if they became lawyers instead? Music ability isn’t limited to one instrument and the voice is just another instrument.
I myself play guitar and piano/keyboards and I don’t auto-tune my vocals and yet they are still in key. I’m not saying they’re perfect and I don’t claim I have the best sounding voice that ever was, but they sound fine. Drum machines are “perfect”, but that doesn’t make them sound human. My problem with auto-tune for artists who CAN sing is that in the attempt for “perfection” they’ve made themselves sound LESS human. If that’s the sound they’re going for, great. I take issue with those on here that think there is no place for that effect or that it’s not “tasteful” even when done on purpose. WTF are you? You get to decide what is artistic and what is not? You go write some songs that other people will actually care about and then you can decide how they are created and performed. Pink Floyd used all kinds of processing and sound effects and Roger Waters cannot sing for squat and Nick Mason is hardly the best drummer on the planet, but this idea they should have stayed in architecture (Gilmour excepted) is ludicrous.
I don’t like country music but that doesn’t mean those people have no talent. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder. I just see a lot of snobbery in these comments. I agree certain people are where they are because of their parents (e.g. Miley), their visual appeal or dance skills (e.g. Britney), but I think anyone that actually cares about what they’re listening to knows those things. If they have a great song, I’ll listen to it. I just like to be aware of who actually wrote the song. They deserve the real credit. Song writing is a skill unto itself. You can be a great player or even a great singer. That doesn’t mean you can write great songs. Similarly, there’s a place for sound recording and mixing engineers, etc. Musical talent isn’t limited only to people who can sing with perfect pitch.
I think any pitch correction is best suited for fixing mistakes in situations where you either can’t re-do a vocal or instrument, or on a take that has everything going for it but a small blemish. DAW’s have made it too easy to try and “fake” things. More and more artists come into a studio unprepared with unfinished material. And ideal situation is to have yourself all ready to record, and have these tools available only is absolutely needed. A safety net if you have one or two bad notes. “We’re here to record our material, oops I missed my cue slightly, let’s get it back in place, that note was a little off let’s nudge it right..” etc. And I do agree some use it as a “effect” but I also agree it’s going to be very dated. The gated drum. The fairlight and synclavier. They scream 80’s. A good song can be timeless and not have to rely on current fad gimmicks.
First of all I totally agree about Rascal Flatts and Autotune. It sickens me to death. I always loved Diamond Rio. Rascal Flatts sounds like the pigmy version of DR while applying Autotune all the way through. Those guys suck.
Also, the rest of the bizz is using it extensively because of the lack of talent out there. Its gotten to where if you look pretty enough and are willing to get “done” anally for a buck…then you are star material. The industry has become filthy trash.
Autotune is great for hiding performers total inability to sing, Smashing the soul out of a performance, saving lazy bastards or seriously time constrained engineers from having to a do a second take and last but not least, getting that “Cher Effect”
I don’t think any of the above are particularly positive reasons to use Autotune in a song, the artifacts sound like shit and the “Cher Effect” sounds even worse, 7 weeks at No 1 really doesn’t mean a thing…here is a list of 100 chart topping songs from the UK charts
http://www.listology.com/list/vh1-uk-worst-100-number-ones
I don’t think a person is born with good taste anymore than a person is born educated or able to read and write, its something we aspire to and develop over time and those that choose not to are generally considered “Ignorant”
The things ignorant people like tend to require the least amount of thought, effort and time to produce which makes them every capitalists wet dream.
The thing is, when kraftwerk where using vocoders etc it sounded well cool, but they where original and talented musicians.
These days you have some tool prancing around on stage that doesn’t write their own songs, doesn’t write their own music, cant play an instrument, and sings so badly that a ton of pitch correction needs to be used to cover up the fact.
And of course the large record companies love it because they can grab any idiot off the street and with enough marketing can make them a top selling “artist†for this season with very little effort.
The adverse effect of this kind of production leads to more and more people turning off commercial radio (bad for big record companies and commercial radio, probably a good thing for music itself)
I was joking with my friend about T-Pain, word is, he’s no joke, Classically trained pianist with actual singing ability. He was just heavily saturated the gimmick and is riding it til’ the end. Listen again to the real jazzy melodies he does pick out, turns out he’s more of a genius than we gave him credit for. One of those things where its either pure genius or naive incompetence, but i can’t tell which is which.
@ Dave as much as I admit that Auto-Tune was been overused in certain songs, whatever you’ve said is nothing short of rubbish. If you want to listen to “proper” and “perfect” music that doesn’t use any Auto-Tune, try classical music or music from pre-1990s, because you’re obviously a Technophobe, meaning that you have no respect for technology whatsoever.
Singing in tune is overrated and has nothing to do with a great vocal performance. Go and listen to Mark Almond on Soft Cell’s Non Stop Erotic Cabaret for a few examples. Autotune simply kills the character of a great vocalist.
can’t wait for the wheel to turn and for people to get sick of plastic music. when nirvana busted on the scene last time around, it only took a few months for people to come to their senses. the human voice is beautiful.
here’s a tip:
ancient greeks made their pillars line up with how humans thought they looked even, not with how their measurements suggested was even. this is very important.
I found this blog post very useful while doing research for a post I did about AutoTune. I also tried recording an Autotune version of Kanye West’s “Amazing” just to prove that Autotune did all the work!
Check it out here: http://www.feross.org/im-amazing-autotune-feross-vs-kanye-west/
– Feross
I see the problem as whether some one has real vocal abilities and can sing in pitch, or is a no-talent faker who shouldn’t be idolized or supported.
Some vocalists can sing in pitch with a good hearing aid or ear plugs tied to the microphone.If you don’t realize that you are singing out of pitch in real time,how can you think you are a quality vocalist someone wants to listen to.Auto-tune is a cheating device just like steroids are to athletes.There should be an independent association that certifies or grades singers similar to coin grading. Establish some basis for identifying the quality of a persons voice good for a certain time say 3 years renewable by another live audition.A certified singer will be proud to whip out their card for gigs ,listed on albums for potential purchasers of their music, and listed on concert promotions. No-talent singing frauds take a hike.
TBH, I use both Autotune 5 and Melodyne in my studio, but hardly ever on lead vocals – if the singer can’t sing it, then we do it again. For stacked BVs, Autotune is very handy. If used properly, Melodyne can be almost undetectable, whereas I find Autotune always leaves a signature.
I do use both on my own voice, though. I’m an OK singer, but my pitching can sometimes be a little wonky. Melodyne for my lead vox and Autotune for my harmonies. Irecord my stuff for me, so it doesn’t bother me that I’m cheating. If that sort of stuff did bother me, then I’d have to stop using EZ Drummer, too!
Just found your excellent article via the BBC website now that Auto Tune abuse has become a minor scandal in Britain following its post-production use in the first episode of the X-Factor audition stages (Simon Cowell’s successor to Pop Idol (UK) / American Idol (USA)). Some no-hopers sounded like robots traversing a chromatic scale of wrong notes, each perfectly placed on the even-tempered scale. Sometimes it was impossible to judge how good or bad the contestants were, not that the public were voting.
Auto-tune type effects have bugged me for ages, and even good singers get turned into dead-voiced robot seranaders by AT and heavy DRC/limiting such that I don’t buy albums that I just know I’d otherwise like.
It was rife (and to me, jarring) in the film Moulin Rouge! (2001) too – presumably Ewan McGregor couldn’t hold a note as well as Nicole Kidman and had to be replaced by a robot vocalist, which sounded really bad to me, but seemed to go unnoticed by the general public.
Anyhow, I’m hopeful that public awareness will lead to a lot more discretion over its use.
Not going to enter the debate as to whether the technology is right or wrong – that’s progress folks – but I do get annoyed when singers who are pitched as world class vocalists clearly use it. However if you want an example of an fairly average vocalist using it (not very subtly, in my opinion) then watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzFV5X9Qbgc
It’s particularly noticeable on the ‘you were there for summer dreaming’ line.
Interestingly, Robbie Williams said that AutoTune was used by just about everyone these days, including him – at least he’s been honest about it!
so many bad singers and famous because of the computer and what it is doing to there voice we the good natural singers are not even notice alot of the time :( it sad because its not even them its the computer and i might sound good sometimes but after a while it just gets old and boring we need to go back to the good old sing from your heart and if you cant hit the note then dont sing it. i think i wouyld feel a hole lot better being famous for something i an doing not what the computer it doing.
thanks :)
I’m just angry that I allowed the autotuner to snow me into buying catchy (somewhat crappy) pop songs on Itunes. So many artists use this technology that it’s difficult to pick out the phonies. Thank you for your list of artists who use Autotune! Awesome website! Keep up the great work!!!
$75, $100, $200, etc. for tickets, and you’re going to sing through Auto-Tune?
Disgusting.
Rascal Flatts et al. should be arrested for fraud.
The RIAA should stuff its DRM and instead require “AUTO-TUNED” warning labels.
Very nice article. However, as others have said, some singers are now using Auto-tune as a modulation effect, comparable to using a pitch-shifter or whammy pedal on a guitar.
In fact, Dan Deacon runs his microphone through a Digitech Whammy pedal to get his voice in that ridiculous chipmunk range, and its hilarious. And that man is a real fucking ARTIST.
I actually prefer auto-tune as used as an effect rather than in the more subtle ways… (where we aren’t supposed to notice it.) As an effect it’s kind of cool (although quite played out and will really date anything that uses it) but when used to subtly put everything perfectly in tune… I think it sort of sucks the life out of the music…. makes it robotic.
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