Saturday, April 17, 2021

Damned auto-tune

Live miming has been going on for donkey’s years and one who was caught out was Betty Boo at a concert downunder when she dropped her mic in the early 90s, was booed offstage (sorry about the pun) and nearly ended her career.

That’s not what this post is about - this is about auto-tuning.  Post production, the voice is tampered with to make it pitch perfect and iron out inconsistencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune

I need to confess that in my recording days in Russia, sound forge and other programmes did that to my voice-overs which were for banks and other corporations as their English language versions.  I do see why it was needed there and in fact, having a home version, I produced my own recordings of music from sampling, before getting into blogging and giving it away.

It took me some time to understand what was going on on youtube with ‘remastered’ songs and why they never sounded as good - one of our readers pointed it out and yes - the whole thing was attenuated, strangely mixed overall ... but that’s a bit different to voice auto-tuning.  One of the more egregious examples was Rebecca Black’s Friday.

I suppose it made voices sound the same and even artificial, which characterises artists after the mid 90s in my humble opinion.  In fact, at this blog, 1997 was singled out as probably the watershed year, after which the music died.  Check that link above and see which year auto-tune started.

One man doing many reaction videos is ‘Fil from Wings of Pegasus’ who I think does mainly metal - strange for someone who appreciates so many genres.  He usually smiles sweetly but in this one:

... he suddenly launched into a rant against auto-tune.  Rightly so.  For reasons stated by so many in the music social media. Echoing his thoughts, it really is awful.

Coupled with that is that the ipad does not allow ‘i frame’ html loading of youtubes and so I must go through ggl’s own process, which means various readers won’t be able to watch.  Url is here:

https://youtu.be/YoyJgSKTozU

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