We’re all probably a little sick of Auto-Tune’s stranglehold on pop and urban radio thanks to Akon, T-Pain, and friends, and a title like “Auto-Tune Abuse In Pop Music” might have you expecting the long-awaited polemic against the vocal effect and its recent overuse as a gimmicky aesthetic in its own right, rather than as a studio corrective for weak performances. Yet the author of this engineering/producing blog seems to be serious with “criticisms” like this one about the production on Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”: “‘OoooOver’ doesn’t sound human.” Or from the comments: “Surely the T-Pain clip was done purposely to achieve that effect…” You think?? [Hometracked via Daily Swarm]
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I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Hometracked is actually a pretty good place for people to get some basic knowledge about various areas of recording/production technique.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to snark the chosen examples (all of which are good), or if you’re disappointed that they didn’t launch into a screed.
Not a lot of people know how to recognize heavily applied auto-tune (they don’t recognize the sound of a vocal being shoved on to the right note by the pitch correction, etc).
So why wouldn’t the author be serious when they say that bit of Sean Kingston doesn’t sound like a human voice? It doesn’t any more than the words the author picked out where you can really hear the auto-tuner shoving the vocal around sound human. Human voices don’t change pitch like that. Human voices don’t have that metallic timbre.
And clearly the commenter you pick out isn’t familiar with T-Pain. Yes, I know it’s shocking, but such people exist!
The author wanted to demonstrate what heavily-applied auto-tune sounds like. They picked out some examples where it’s really obvious.
What’s the big deal?