Category Archives: recording

The Wrath of Auto-Tune

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A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine who had a recording studio in Nashville was telling me a story about an experience he’d recently had in the studio. Every year, all of the smaller recording studios used to hold open houses on the same day, where artists and managers were invited to come and check out the facilities so they would potentially record their next project there. This guy told me that at one point during the day, several well-known country artists were sitting in a room in his recording facility, jamming together as a couple of them played guitar. What struck my friend at the time was that some of them could sing, and some of them really couldn’t! He made a quip about how you could tell which ones needed Auto-Tune when they were recording and performing :-).

Some of you may have heard the word “Auto-Tune” before, but most, if not all of you have heard its effects if you listen to music. For those of you who don’t recognize the word, Auto-Tune is a digital technology that corrects musical pitch. To simplify that, music producers use the software to “fix” the pitch of vocals or instruments so that they are perfect. Even the best singers can be slightly off pitch when they are recording or performing, so the software could save lots of time and effort by simply correcting it either while it is being sung, or afterwards in post-production.

The first time you might have heard Auto-Tune in its extreme was in Cher’s hit song “Believe”, recorded in 1998. It was used as an effect to make her voice sound robotic in a few places in the song’s chorus, particularly on the line “do you believe in life after love?” If you remember that song, then you’ve heard Auto-Tune. But the fact is that Auto-Tune is used in pretty much every single pop song these days. Everything you hear in this genre has been “fixed” with Auto-Tune. In fact, if you go to a live performance, particularly pop or rock, rap or hip hop, Auto-Tune is used as part of the performance. At music awards shows, many “live” performances of songs are run through Auto-Tune. You don’t hear the actual, raw, live voice of a performer.

You might think, well, what’s wrong with perfect?

A few years back, there was a music awards show broadcast live on television where Taylor Swift did a live performance. She appeared to be one of the only performers who DIDN’T use Auto-Tune that evening. As a result, her voice was raw and real, and it was not pitch perfect. Immediately afterwards, social media came alive with comments like “Taylor Swift can’t sing!” and other, more critical responses to her performance. At the time, I remember applauding her for her guts, but I think since then she has probably given in to the use of Auto-Tune in her performances.  The pressure to be perfect these days, has become too great.

From a performer viewpoint, anyone and their dog can “sing” now, and YouTube has had many, many videos with animals or public figures “singing” songs that they actually aren’t, the creators using Auto-Tune and some fancy editing to create these videos.

But what has happened to listeners, particularly younger people, is that their ears are now conditioned to desire “perfect” sounds, and when they hear something that isn’t, it’s aurally offensive to them. Anything that is real and imperfect sounds like a mistake.  Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell real talent from manufactured, certainly when it comes to recording.  And performers become so reliant on the software, they can’t live without it.

There are, however, artists who refuse to use it and a campaign against Auto-Tune that is growing.  In a 2009 performance on the Grammy Awards, for example, Deathcab For Cutie wore blue ribbons to protest the use of Auto-Tune in the music industry.  Even some recording engineers and producers are now trying to wean artists off the thing in an attempt to bring “real” back into recordings and performances.

So what’s wrong with perfect?  It makes everything sound the same.  Perfect pitch, perfect timing, perfect everything, creates perfect garbage.  And who needs more of that?  Let’s keep it real!

IJ

Shades of Grey

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IJ in Maui on the lanai with a beer…

Winter on the wetcoast can be a grey and dreary affair, but for me this last month has been anything but dreary.  At the end of January I spent a marvelous 9 days in Maui with my husband, and only last weekend I was back at the spa with my fabulous friends on our annual getaway.  What a spoiled brat I am!

To top the whole month off, I have finally managed to finish recording my last CD…one that has taken me over 10 years to complete.  I’ve been pondering the question of why it has taken me so long;  the last CD I released was in 2000, and I actually released two of them very close together.   “Catnip” and “undressed” came when I was at the top of my game, having a very prolific period of writing, recording and performing.  But at this point, I haven’t written a song for several years, I have stopped performing completely, and finishing this latest project has been such a long and arduous process.  What gives?

My only conclusion is that I was hijacked by personal events and menopause.  When I first got married and started having children the same thing happened.  Life got in the way of that self-centredness that is needed to write and/or record.  You can’t be so terribly self-involved when you’re raising kids.  But as they got a little older I was able to, for little bits of time, run upstairs and finish my first recording, Foolishly Fantasizing.  And in my 40’s I was a lot freer to do those kinds of things, so writing and recording and performing became more of a focus.  But menopause brought that all to an abrupt halt.

Okay, I guess it wasn’t really abrupt; it probably snuck up on me gradually and then became very apparent in my late 40’s and into my 50’s.  The inability to concentrate, the moodiness (which, you would think, would somehow drive some kind of creativity, but it didn’t), the depressing physical symptoms, all came together in the form of a ‘writus interruptous’ and my usual creative flow was gone.  And other personal challenges with my family didn’t help either.

So it was with great shock that I sat down two weeks ago and realized that I had actually finished the recording of “Shades of Grey”.  And yesterday I came very close to finishing the mastering stage.  For those of you who don’t know anything about recording, the mastering process in recording is like the final polish on a sculpture or the framing of a painting;  it essentially balances and equalizes all of the recorded songs so that they work together as a collection on a CD.

Now I’m very aware that in the 10 years since my last release, the music world has changed considerably.  It isn’t as much about collections of songs in a CD these days;  now it’s about “singles” the way it was back in the 50’s and 60’s.  You can simply put one song at a time out there in the universe and possibly see some sales from it on its own, but for me this is a collection of songs that all belong together.  The subjects of the songs range from longing and lust and letting go, to recognizing the reality of relationships, to getting older.  I’ve always been attracted to writing about what I consider the “grey areas” of life, so the CD title is a play on the word grey which is also the colour of a few strands of my hair these days!

And in a way, there is something very final and finished about it.  I said to my husband a year ago that I just wanted to get it done.  And if I never write again, at least I will feel that I’ve finished something rather than just letting it all just hang there.  So I am finally reaching that point.  Once the CD is done and the cover, which is being designed by myself and my daughter, is finished, I’ll announce it here.  You’ll be able to sample bits of it and I’ll likely do another blog entry just about the songs themselves.  So stay tuned.

Now that I think of it, maybe the events of the last last few years will give me a new crop of songs!  You just never know…

IJ