James Boyk wrote:

I confess amazement at use of Auto-Tune, or whatever it's called. A
musician's intonation is as personal as anything about his or her
music-making except possibly rhythm. It's one of the things that that
musician's music personal and identifiable. Of course I'm speaking of
voice and instruments where the player controls the pitch. As a pianist,
my only role in this aspect of music-making is to choose the tuner,
which I do whenever possible.

I'm amazed that anyone would give up control of intonation---or am I
missing the boat. Is this done on only one or two clunker notes, not on
the whole line?

James Boyk

Just about every major label record now has the lead vocal autotuned. It
seems to have become prevalent in the last 2 or 3 years where all of a
sudden everyone has perfect pitch. For background vocals, some do, some
don't. Personally I leave the background vocs alone unless there is a
particularly bad note.

One of the problems is that a lot of the top engineers will have one of
their assistants or the pro tools guy do the autotune because it's so
tedious. However, they just go in and draw a single line at the note
from beginning to end and it is easily (and unpleasantly) audible. Also,
due to budget constraints and such for most projects nowadays, there is
pressure to finish the record in a specific amount of time and therefore
the engineers will sometimes not care about pitch when tracking the
vocal. The problem with is that the farther the singer is from the
correct pitch, the more the Autotuning becomes audible, so you requently
get that "chipmunk" sound because the singer was, say, a whole semitone
under pitch (for the whole track!) when tracking.

Done correctly though, it can have have a major effect on even the best
singers. And once you tune a few notes, you'll find that other notes are
all of a sudden slightly off pitch so you almost always have to tune the
entire vocal track.

I personally prefer a _very_ conservative approach to autotuning, but I
wouldn't dare release a record without the lead vocal tuned at all. Not
if I want radio play. I also usually tune solo string instruments if
it's not a classical record. It saves having the string player do 20
takes (and paying them union wages!!) and the artifacts of autotuning on
strings are not nearly as audible as on a vocal.

Ekechi