lindsmuse wrote
I never even knew this technology existed. Surely there is nothing in this world better than a good voice? Does this mean that a lot of those voices - those Whitney clones are fake? I could never understand how those singers do those vocal gymnastics (which I have come to dislike).
Listen to Cher's "If You Believe", that is a deliberate overuse of Autotune to achieve an effect. I think you can hear it sometimes depending on how aggressively the software is used.
I think the gymnastics that you refer to are down to two things
1) Fashion
2) Singers who cannot hit a note and hold it, so warble up and down the scale instead. I could be wrong, this is what I THINK, and it is certainly not universal. Some contemporary singers can sing very well. I don't particularly like what Christina Aguilera, for instance, does, but there's no point in saying that she can't sing - she certainly can.
It also gets used live by people who can sing well. Reba McIntyre, whose career predates autotune by decades, fessed up to using it live, saying that there were nights on tour when she hit a bum note or two and so Autotune would spare the audience the less than perfect vocal performance.
My inner snob prefers that singers deliver an intune performance from start to finish, but life ain't that simple. Many vocal performances in the 60s, 70s and 80s were stitched together from multiple takes for all sorts of reasons. I recall Linda Thompson doing this on the classic
Shoot Out The Lights album. Richard and the band had got everything else done in 3 days, but she was pregnant and couldn't breathe properly, and also suffering from the early stages of the nervous problem that would eventually bring her singing career to a halt for 20 years or so. So she sat in the studio with producer Joe Boyd and the engineer and recorded the songs a line at a time. Nobody who knows Linda Thompson thinks she can't sing, but that's how that record was made. And
Shoot Out The Lights was a made on a very tight budget. Linda's vocal problems meant that they went way over budget, so maybe Autotune would have meant the job would have been done in time and within budget. (These days Linda Thompson is recording again, but she needs botox shots into her vocal chords so it takes a long time to make a record and she seldom performs live)
I do think a problem can arise in that you sit listening to a performance and wondering how much of it is "real". The most egregious case would be Milli Vanilli, but I recall lots of talk in the late 80s about Sting not being completlely "live" in concert.
I'd rather have my ears grated by Dylan than listen to a whole choir of these tricky songsters ... I hate emotion being stripped and stylised and packaged and crap. That's maybe why I don't get death metal - those guys can't sing so they worked out another formula so that they can just get up and PLAY. They solved the vocal problem - just ROAR ... maybe they also use auto-tune or auto-something, who knows?
I am changing my views on vocals, ever since I saw Martin Carthy live in London a couple of years ago. I enjoyed it SOOOO much. A fabulous performance, he completely blew me away with the passion and the empotional punch of what he did. After a while I was hardly paying any attention to the guitar playing - which is what I went to see. His vocals were a challenge for me initially. He sings in particular rustic English style, which can be a bit difficult for ears raised on pop & rock (where the vocals mostly stem from black american styles). But OK there was the sheer excellence and passion of what he was doing, and then there's the fact that his pitch was great, he had very good control of his vocals. It was an unconventional style (to my unacustomed ears) but technically it was all correct. So I made the necessary mental leap early on and then sat back and enjoyed one of the best performances I ever witnessed.
Same with metal. Yes, it can sound like there's a lot of screaming and bellowing going on, and it's unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean that those guys can't sing. They just sing differently.
Maybe my early absorption in Dylan makes these things easier for me. Opening myself up to Martin Carthy's performance (which wasn't hard, he was SO good) definitely helped to change my perspective on vocals and did me a favour I think.
Bob did you see the move "The Songcatcher"? Think you would have loved that - it was on the Art movie circuit about 6 years ago.
Love that clip with 'How I met your mother'! ?
I fell asleep during that movie - which should reflect more on me than on the movie.
