Examples of Auto-tune: song titles?

[fet]

Because I seldom listen to pop music recorded after 1970 or so, I am unfamiliar with the "Autotune" process so widely complained-about on many of these excellent BBs. Can someone give titles of current (last few years) hits that use this process in an obvious or obtrusive manner? Thanks to all who respond.

[JohnBartus]

The big example is, of course, Cher's "Believe." Faith Hill features the effect on "The Way You Love Me." There's a new Madonna song which also has the effect, but I can't remember its title.

 

The effect is also used (sparingly to overdose, depending on the engineer) to repair vocal takes, and not as an effect itself.

 

Hope this helps.

 

 

 

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John Bartus

Radio Active Productions

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[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by fet:

of these excellent BBs. Can someone give titles of current (last few years) hits that use this process in an obvious or obtrusive manner? Thanks to all who respond.

 

Seems like just about anything on MTV or the country video stations.... It's pretty obvious.

 

http://www.mp3.com/chipmcdonald

[Tedster]

There's a Kid Rock tune, too...a slow one, a little on the mellow side. If you're unfamiliar with autotune, it sounds as though Cher's cybernetic double has taken her over and is singing for her.

 

I hope it goes the way of the synth toms that were big in the 70s, in other words, away.

[miroslav]

Originally posted by Tedster:

...it sounds as though Cher's cybernetic double has taken her over and is singing for her...

 

Though I think that trying to slip in autotune subliminally is comparable to breast implants...

 

...in the case of Cher's Believe, I liked it when I first heard it because it is more of a deliberate effect...or so it seems to me.

Maybe they (producer/engineer) were trying to slip it in, but it sure came out like an effect...almost a vocoder quality.

 

If there a a few spots where a vocalist needs a little help, OK, but to just stick the autotune "in-line with the microphone" and let it run on everything...who's foolin' who?

 

Baby, we don't "fix it in the mix", we "fix it on the fly", sooo...screech away...it's OK!

[John Worthington]

Originally posted by miroslav:

...in the case of Cher's Believe, I liked it when I first heard it because it is more of a deliberate effect...or so it seems to me.

Maybe they (producer/engineer) were trying to slip it in, but it sure came out like an effect...almost a vocoder quality.

 

There was an interview in SOS with the guys who produced the track. It was intentional. They were screwing around and thought it sounded cool. Took a while for them to get up the guts to play if for Cher since they were sure she'd hate it. She obviously didn't.

 

jw

[PLX18O]

Chers engineers spread the story that Chers voice didn't have Autotune at all, and that it was in fact a vocoder. But this was obviously because Cher didn't want the public thinking she needed Autotuning!

 

I bought Autotune, but have never had cause to use it *smug grin*

[Submersible]

Chers engineers spread the story that Chers voice didn't have Autotune at all, and that it was in fact a vocoder.

 

I saw that article too. Didn't believe it for a second.

[x factor music]

the autotune these days is almost as gimmicky and commonplace as the vocoder/robot voice was in the early 80's (a la "no parking on the dance floor," "scorpio," etc). the trick is to try to detect it when the engineers are hiding it and using it for out and out pitch correction rather than effect. it's real obvious on songs like "blue" by eiffel 66 and "only god knows why" by kid rock, but less obvious in the numerous country and r&b songs...even in modern rock and alternative. i've always suspected that in the LIT song "my own worst enemy" it's being used heavily in the chorus where he goes "please tell me WHY EYE EYE EYE EYE" it sounds too processed. anyone else notice that?

[Marvster]

<>

 

"Believe" may use Auto-Tune, but according to the producer (in the SOS article), the infamous effect was a Digitech Talker with a Nord Rack carrier signal.

 

Marv

[Marvster]

<>

 

Believe it or not, sometimes the artist doesn't even know they've been corrected -- or how *much* they've been corrected. I tuned a very famous artist (on a boutique album for Warner Bros. that flopped), but always during off-session hours with the producer so the artist wouldn't know. Must be nice to think you're perfect, eh?

 

Before Auto-Tune we used to tune vocals with either samplers (using a resample function, which also screwed up the timing) or, a little later, with file-based processing. Since there's no real skill to using Auto-Tune it's usually baked into standard engineering duties nowadays, but those of us who spent weeks doing it the old-fashioned way demanded album credit. This is why, especially before 1997-98 or so, you'll see lots of generic credits like "additional programming" and "sound design." ;-)

 

Marv

 

 

 

 

This message has been edited by Marvster on 03-20-2001 at 11:38 PM

[rumpelstiltskin.]

Originally posted by xfactor111@home.com:

i've always suspected that in the LIT song "my own worst enemy" it's being used heavily in the chorus where he goes "please tell me WHY EYE EYE EYE EYE" it sounds too processed. anyone else notice that?

 

who's a genius? i've always noticed that, too, and wondered why it sounded that way. you may be on to something.

[rawpop]

And I thought those (Cher, Kid Rock, et al.) were just an in-vogue vocoder...

 

How silly of me!

 

(Seriously, does Autotune with artifacts sound like a vocoder?)

[masternfool]

I heard there has not been an album come out of nashville in the last 3-4 years that doesn't have autotune on it. It's very obvious on all the country music today.

I sold my rack mount,to get the d8b versions when available.

[Dylan]

Raw, I think your right. Last time I checked AutoTune didn't have a vocoder feature. "Believe" and that Kid Rock tune use a classic vocoder effect, nothing more. Of course, they could of also used AutoTune for the pitch, but that's a different story ;-). A good example of artist who use AutoTune? My guess would be Back Street Boys, N Sync, Britney Spears, etc.

 

-Dylan

 

Originally posted by rawpop:

And I thought those (Cher, Kid Rock, et al.) were just an in-vogue vocoder...

 

How silly of me!

 

(Seriously, does Autotune with artifacts sound like a vocoder?)

[x factor music]

i may be wrong, but in gig magazine or electronic musician or something like that around the time that "believe" came out, the answer to that sound was "turn the autotune up to 11."

 

what you're hearing, again, unless i'm wrong, is the processor applying a perfect "snap-to" effect to the vocal for that mechanical "in tune" sound. makes sense, cuz if the autotune is supposed to be programmable with some sort of variance to get "in tune" vocals, it would stand to reason that if you overdid it, the effect would sound like...well, that cher song. it may have then been run through a vocoder for effect, but i think it sounds a bit different than the vocoder used to sound 20 years ago.

[Marvster]

Again, it's a Digitech Talker. Here's the section from the SOS article:

 

Everyone who hears 'Believe' immediately comments on the vocals, which are unusual, to say the least. Mark says that for him, this was the most nerve-racking part of the project, because he wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what he'd done to her voice. For those who've been wondering, yes -- it's basically down to vocoding and filtering (for more on vocoders and the theory behind them, see the Power Vocoding workshop in SOS January '94).

 

Mark: "It all began with a Korg VC10, which is a very rare, very groovy-looking analogue vocoder from the '70s, with a built-in synth, a little keyboard and a microphone stuck on top", he enthuses. "You must mention this, because SOS readers will love it -- and I know, because I've been reading the mag for years!

 

"Anyway, the Korg VC10 looks bizarre, but it's great to use if you want to get vocoder effects up and running straight away. You just play the keyboard to provide a vocoder carrier signal, sing into the microphone to produce the modulator signal, and off you go. The only drawback is the synth -- you can't do anything to change the sound, so the effects you can produce are rather limited.

 

"I played around with the vocals and realised that the vocoder effect could work, but not with the Korg -- the results just weren't clear enough. So instead, I used a Digitech Talker -- a reasonably new piece of kit that looks like an old guitar foot pedal, which I suspect is what it was originally designed for [see review in SOS April '98]. You plug your mic straight into it, and it gives you a vocoder-like effect, but with clarity; it almost sounds like you've got the original voice coming out the other end. I used a tone from the Nord Rack as a carrier signal and sequenced the notes the Nord was playing from Cubase to follow Cher's vocal melody. That gave the vocals that 'stepped' quality that you can hear prominently throughout the track -- but only when I shifted the the Nord's notes back a bit. For some reason, if you track the vocal melody exactly, with the same notes and timing, you hardly get get any audible vocoded effect. But I was messing about with the Nord melody sequence in Cubase and shifted all the notes back a fraction with respect to the vocal. Then you really started to hear it, although even then it was a bit hit-and-miss -- I had to experiment with the timing of each of the notes in the Nord melody sequence to get the best effect. You couldn't hear an effect on all the vocals by any means -- and on others it made the words completely impossible to understand!

 

Full article here: http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/feb99/articles/tracks661.htm

[x factor music]

okay, i'll concede the point here...but if the korg vocoder they used is so rare, why is it that the effect is so overused now? i've been way off, apparently...

[John Worthington]

Originally posted by xfactor111@home.com:

okay, i'll concede the point here...but if the korg vocoder they used is so rare, why is it that the effect is so overused now? i've been way off, apparently...

 

A couple of things. Number 1, it wasn't the Korg vocoder it was the Digitech pedal and a Nord rack.

 

As far as how everyone else does it, there are lots of ways to get similar sounds. You can get something close using the audio in on a Nord modular and the internal vocoder module. I don't doubt but what you could do the same ting with an Auto-Tune, I just haven't tried.

 

The big point is that it was an inteneded effect, not auto-tune gone wild while processing the rest of the track.

 

jw

[Master Zap]

Although I can probably be found on some other BB arguing the reverse unfortunately, the truth seems to be, after some digging of my own that

 

a) it is NOT a digitech talker and a nord. That article is a L I E deliberitely LIED UP byt the producer to a) throw people off and b) not to associate "cher" with "auto tune"(ing) needs.

 

b) It is autotune and if you set glide to zero or whatever the setting is, it takes *ALL* pitch fluctuations out of the voice and it DOES sound very robotic and "vocoder"-ish although it is from a TECHNICAL standpoint *NOT* a vocoder, but a pitch corrector. Just that normal human vocals have fluctuations and if you hammer them out to Z E R O it sounds robot even though it still "is" the original voice there.

 

/Z

[Dylan]

I highly doubt that this producer or any producer for that matter would lie about the gear that was used to make a hit record. The effect used on "Believe" is clearly a vocoder triggered by a keyboard, so if he said it's a Digitech Talker and a Nord then it probably is. His story check's out. If he were to lie he'd probably say that it was some custom made expensive vocoder and not some off the shelf Digitech. I've yet to hear of AutoTune being able to create any vocoder-like effects. Otherwise, they'd probably advertise that it could.

 

-Dylan

[Master Zap]

I can't find the reference but he actually came clean that he did, in fact, lie in the SoS interview. (People tend to split up intp 50/50 groups who believes what story)

 

I say its clearly autotune. Thats *exactly* what autotune sounds like on super-hard setting. It is probably INTENTIONALLY not marketed as a vocoder because that would give the wrong impression of what autotune does, but on super-hard setting ("cranked to 11") it sounds very robotic and "vocoder LIKE".

 

However, my Digitech Vocalist can sound *exactly* like that if I use super-hard pitch-correct and play some MIDI into it (not so strange, it's doing the same thing). So maybe a Digitech Talker could too.

 

But it sure sounds like Autotune to me. The Kid Rock thing is even more obviously Autotune - not a "vocoder". Remember, crank to 11.

 

/Z

[D. Gauss]

i'm waiting for that new box/plugin to be invented: auto-taste!

[rawpop]

okay Zap,

 

let's just play out your theory here. so what I thought was vocoder all over the place is really autotune abuse? and the engineers/producers just leave it that way? producer to engineer, "jeez, that sounds cool, let's just leave besides, everybody else is doin' it..." hmmm. I just find that really hard to believe. and if it is true, more importantly, who cares? do people enjoy it? then cool! i thought this was the "entertainment" business...

[BOOKUMDANO]

I'm not a big country music fan, but listen to the song "You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone" by Brooks & Dunn. First few words of the second verse. To me, there's something really strange happening to the vocal for about the first six or seven words and I sometimes wonder if it's Auto-tune kicking in. The only thing is that I don't know if Antares was around the year that song was recorded.

[Dylan]

M'kay kids, let's think about something for a minute. Suppose it is AutoTune making that effect on the track "Believe". The problem that I have with this theory is that it doesn't explain how the engineer got that 'stepped' quality that he claims was from a Nord Lead. Without the keyboard carrier signal playing the vocal melody I don't see how this would be possible. Unlike the basic vocoder effect, the 'stepped' effect is not apparent the whole time when she's singing, if I recall. BTW, this is a fun thread ;-)

 

-Dylan

[hiraga]

I read another article with the procucers where they said it was.. a Roland Vocoder.. (either EQ or Recording, or The MIX.. can't remember)

 

Does it matter? It's a fuck'ed up highly annoying effect, that's gone from *wauw, that's kewl!* to *oh no NOT again*..

 

It's outdated, over and out. Regardless of the tool used.

 

Autotuning is probably the next feature in a channelstrip, pre, gate, comp, eq, autotune, aux, mute, fader..

 

It's just a tool, that's being abused by well, just about anyone. Like Finalizers, I guess.

[Dylan]

Amen, brother. Thanks to this thread I've had this god-awful song in my head since yesterday ;-).

 

-Dylan

 

Originally posted by hiraga:

)Does it matter? It's a fuck'ed up highly annoying effect, that's gone from *wauw, that's kewl!* to *oh no NOT again*..

[hiraga]

Yeah, but the Cher thingie set a new record!

 

It actually went from *way kewl* to *ARGHHH!!* within the same song!!

 

Normally, it takes several songs, where at least a few needs to be Top 40s..

 

Like the *revolutionary* (it's 'true', I read it myself.. reeeveeelutionary!) drum programming in Christina Aqi.. Aqliu.. the half naked chiq.. a dozen songs came out like that quite fast..

 

Amazing how the industry progresses!

[hiraga]

Oh yeah, it was 'Weenie In A Bottle'..