Saturday, February 26, 2011

Poor Lead Singers Celebrate with an Autotune Plugin

By Andy Ainsworth


Are you a bad lead singer with ideas of making it as a pop superstar? Want to get around your lack of vocation? Now you can. Ever question why well-known singers sound excellent on their records but nasty throughout a live performance. It is as ingenuous as a little creation called autotune. An autotune plugin can aid anybody achieve musical greatness-even if your skills are not up to standard.

Here is what an autotune plugin can do: Perfects the pitch of sung or instrumental performances Corrects mistakes or inaccuracies so you do not have to vocalize in tune Fixes timing difficulty in case you fluff a word or a beat Distorts the individual voice to cause you sound better than you really are Ability to instantaneously switch amongst the time-shifted audio soundtrack and the initial soundtrack Will record MIDI note data that is routed to it and can even register this on the Pitch Graph. Users can therefore make annotations about changes in real-time.

It is easy for anyone to use, from the professionals to the amateurs. However, the uncertainty remains; is an autotune plugin only a tool for doctoring up shoddy music? Well, yes and no. While you can draw on autotune for a variety of "aboveboard" reasons- like you recorded a just about picture perfect track with one or two mistakes-it can also be used to completely skew an original soundtrack.

The inaugural major hit song that this software was used for was Cher's "Believe." After that, additional artists followed suit, realizing their dreams of fooling the public into thinking bad singers were good.

Other artists, however, have taken a stance in opposition to it. Country singers such as Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, and Loretta Lynn have refused to employ AutoTune plugin technology. At the Grammy Awards in 2009, Death Cab for Cutie appeared wearing decorations that protested the use of AutoTune. Additionally, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer released a disc in 2002 that shed light on the row. The disc came with a decal that said, "Absolutely no vocal tweaking or pitch adjustment was used in the making of this disc."

One music critic went as far as to claim the autotune plugin was a "particularly foreboding creation." For bad and good singers similarly, one thing is clear: No need for gargling brine, practicing your pitch, and resting your pipes. Thanks autotune!




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