TheGreatCoolEnergy said:
Probably been asked, but:
How much auto-tune typicaly goes into a pop-song these days, how is the right amount decided on, and how much influence in the "auto tune" descision does an artist actually have?
I've addressed Auto-tune several times in other threads, but I don't think I've discussed it in detail in
this thread, or at least if I did, I couldn't find my own post. In any event, nobody has asked me your
specific questions before, which I think are quite good ones and deserve a lengthy reply so here we go:
Before I even start answering your questions, it's important to clear up a very important and extremely common misconception about Auto-tune. There's two reasons, theoretically, why someone might use Auto-tune:
1. As a "cool" vocal effect
2. To fool people into thinking a crap singer can actually sing
...but for the purpose of your questions, only the first one matters. Now to explain why, and forgive me, but this will take some time...
Auto-tune is a pitch-corrector. It takes a musical note and moves it from where it is situated to the nearest correct musical pitch.
How it does this can vary - if you slide the "pitch correction" tool all the way to 100% you get an effect where the audio "snaps" immediately to the nearest correct pitch. This is what we call "hard Auto-tune" and the unnatural, robotic noise that results is the effect that everybody knows and associates with Auto-tune, audible in the following famous early example at 0:36-0:37, 0:43 and 0:48.
However, she's not using Auto-tune throughout the
whole song. If she was, the "no" that she sings at 1:12 where she slides down in pitch would also come out sounding robotic, like a keyboard scale instead of a vocal slide. So it's being used selectively here, deliberately, to generate that robotic effect in certain places on the track. Cher
can sing quite well, she's been singing since the days of Sonny & Cher in the 1960s, she doesn't
need pitch-correction to hit the notes right. It was used because Cher (or someone else in the studio) decided that the effect sounded "cool".
Here's one of The Escapist's favourite examples of Auto-tune, and in this case the vocalist doing the singing vocals has Auto-tune on him throughout the whole song (the rapper guy doesn't have any however - after all he isn't trying to "pitch" anything):
Unlike Cher, Brokencyde aren't exactly great singers. When the singer is doing his first bit, you can hear a "stutter" effect occasionally. This is where the singer has hit the note somewhere halfway between the correct note and the one immediately next to it, and the program flips back and forth deciding whether to raise the pitch to note 1 or lower it to note 2. This oscillating is most noticeable when he goes up high at 0:57.
Brokencyde however aren't trying to convince anyone that they're the world's greatest singers, because if they were, they wouldn't have recorded this:
...so they're using the sound in Freaxxx, once again, simply because they like the effect. In other words, they're using it for the same reason Cher is. Same goes for Ke$ha, Lady Gaga (who can sing
like a ************), T-Pain etc. They simply
like that sound.
When it comes to actually "fooling" someone, "hard Auto-tune" is actually a mistake to use, because as soon as you hear that robotic snapping effect, the jig is up - anyone over the age of 6 knows that the singer isn't really hitting those notes. However, with Auto-tune programs you don't have to slide the pitch-correction all the way to 100% - you can instead do things like say to it "if a singer hits the note 30% out of key, correct him/her by 20% within 200 milliseconds". The time-delay and the not-quite-perfect pitch correction conspire to make the vocalist sound
more in key, while retaining a more natural sound, and if an effect like this was on a singer's voice, you probably wouldn't be able to tell. Hell, even I couldn't probably tell. So the moral of the story is this - it's when you
never hear Auto-tune, that's when you should be more worried about a vocalist's ability - it means they're more likely to be hiding something. In fact Auto-tune was an industry secret until Cher's "Believe" eventually spilled the beans...
So to your questions, and all three of them are basically the same question - is the Auto-tune decision being made by the artist themselves, or is it someone else forcing them to use it? Well, that varies. In Cher's case it was probably the engineer saying "hey let's try this crazy new effect" (it was new back then) and then everyone agreed when listening back that it sounded good. Someone like T-Pain considers Auto-tune "his sound" and he'll use it on everything because he wants to. A lot of other artists will use it just because it's a trendy sound right now. They'll stop using it in 10 years for the same reason. Sometimes a studio producer might say "put Auto-tune on it, just to see what it sounds like" and then everyone listens back (including the artist) and a mutual decision is made that it sounds better that way. Generally, the artist
does get a choice, other people working on the album have their say, but the final yes or no about Auto-tune typically is the artist's call. I've never known of a situation where management stepped in and said "you can't release that shit until we Auto-tune it", but they might say "you can't release that shit because it sounds like your singer has a nutsack in his mouth" and then the artist, producer and engineer might have a round-table discussion and say "let's Auto-tune it" rather than using some other pitch-correction tool such as resampling... listen to this, for example:
Everybody who has ever heard a Public Enemy record in their lifetime knows that Flavor can't pitch a note with more than about 50% accuracy, he's fooling absolutely nobody. If Flavor wanted to make people think he was a good vocalist, the producer could have either gotten Flav to retake the vocals again and again and then cut/pasted a good vocal performance, or failing that, just corrected his pitches with resampling. But rest assured that there are many ways to get a bad singer sounding good, and Auto-tune is only the latest one. Pitch-correction has been around in one form or another since the 1960s.
(Incidentally, I wonder if he wears that clock to bed... maybe that's the real reason he has trouble finding a girlfriend, surely it would get in the way of things...)
