Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Stop the Madness. The Auto Tuner Must Die

If anyone has read the book 1984, there is a small reference to the music created for the "Proles." This was music created by the Party. It was for music the masses. It had no substance. I have just spent the past seven hours listening to the satellite channel titled "The Heat." You can find it on XM, channel 68. The purveyors of said station must think that we are all Proles. It's a grab bag of meaningless garbage, mostly referring to making love, losing a lover, or attempting to acquire a lover. The common thread in this never-ending musical nightmare is the auto tuner. Every song uses this horrid device. I know that this post has nothing to do with Wisconsin, but I had to vent somewhere.

When I was working on the vocal tracks to our cd, I came upon a section of a song that needed to be "auto tuned." Our singer had a touch of what could be best described as a warble in one of the back up harmonies. We tried to find a workable note from one of the six times she sang this part in the song. No luck, she warbled in every one of them. The engineer put that track through an auto tuner, and goodbye warble. I doubt that anyone but the most professional of ears will notice, but this helpful tool fixed something substantially messed up.

Yes, so many others have ripped on people who make the auto tuner an integral part of their song. I'm certainly not the first, or even the thousandth person to complain. The point I am trying to make here is that this effective studio tool has morphed. The Heat on XM is not to blame, but they are guilty of what I would call a music crime.

1 comment:

Xenocidebot said...

Has autotune been abused of late as a gimmicky effect? Yes.
Is shallow music for the masses a modern concept? No. It wasn't unique when Orwell wrote about it, nor when it was bawdy drinking songs in bars.