How prevalent is autotune in indie?

I've messed around with Melodyne (if you skip the auto mode and only nudge the notes that stand out as 'off', you can do amazing things) and seen bands live where there was quite a gulf between album vocals and live vocals, and I'm starting to think there's a helluvalot of this sort of thing going on on 'raw' 'independent' 'real' recordings.

Specifically, I've heard multiple live versions of Gideon by My Morning Jacket, and he seems to go way sharp/flat on the exact same notes each time, which are fine on the album, and there's a long held note at the end (the second 'oooooonnn') that seems to hold exact pitch in quite an unnatural way.

How widespread is this (in rockist authentic 4-track land)? And does it matter?

Personally, I'm idir dhá thine Bhealtaine - for the album, anything goes - I would be in favour of the band hiring poor far eastern kids to physically hammer ones and zeroes into the CD if it made the best sound, but I do get upset when I see a band live and I find they've hoodwinked me into thinking their vocalist could hold a tune.

think apples in stereo had a vocoder song that was like ten seconds long on their last one

i used this for an off moog bass note on the album we just finished. no way around it, the rogue moog just doesn't stay in tune with everything else. didn't use it anywhere else though, even stray cello notes that were a tad off sounded better that way.

k3vin k. you're trying to derail the discussion already :) Not to rag, but people seem to confuse autotune/vocoding/talkbox/etc. Basically, apart from Cher/T-Pain situations where it was creatively abused, the point of le autotune is for it to be invisible - maybe prosoundweb etc is the right forum to look for dirt? And report back here (ahem).

Bob Mould did a ton of it on his last solo disc

i mean it was Cher/TPain style, sorry didn't read

i can't speak for its prevalence, but it certainly doesn't seem to be used rarely. a recent album i really dig, a scottish band called the hussy's, have really overused it - and based on their earlier stuff their singer's voice is occasionally flat but nothing worth destroying the sound of it for.

my own use of it has had mixed results. it's awesome when used as a deliberate effect, but trying to use it transparently is extremely time consuming and i would say often pretty unsuccessful

Why can't they just find someone who can sing? Focus the media on the betterlooking other guys, like um Fall Out Boy or something.

why indeed. a question that plagues our age.

I haven't been paying attention. How prevalent is autotune in India?

endemic

Ní raibh fhios agam go raibh Éireannach nua againn anseo...? I'm sure autotune can't be the only factor in better studio performances than live though.

Red Hot Chili peppers have used it heavily from "Californication" onwards.

It's as prevalent in indie as in every other type of pop. Even if some of the singers don't know it.

From an <a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/31252-interview-neko-case";>interview</a> with Neko Case: I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, "How many people don't use auto tune?" and he said, "You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who've never used it in here."

Sorry for the HTML...

hey dudes it's also easier to stay in tune singing in the studio where you can do, you know, multiple takes and control the volume of the backing music etc. it's not a big fucking conspiracy

OR IS IT????

I think n/a's in on it

you have obviously never heard me sing

http://pitchfork.com/news/37704-echo-chamber-bon-iver/

i don't hate autotune a thousandth as much as people whining about it

bon iver showing u how to irl troll

electricsound OTM

It seems like there would be more ways to fuck with auto-tune than are currently being used. Now people seem to use it either A) invisibly to correct vocal flubs or B) overtly fucked with like Cher or T Pain just as a neat effect. But couldn't you also do stuff like make all sorts of crazy harmonies and vocal manipulations that no human could ever do? It seems like auto tune as an instrument is still relatively unexplored.

i agree, though i know people use melodyne for that sort of thing.

I know for a fact that Wayne Coyne uses auto-tune live at times, because his voice is shot these days
I don't know about in the studio

My suspicion is that there's just as much auto tune use amongst the "major" indie bands as there is in any other genre, like someone else said, sometimes the singer is not even aware of its addition

What's really blown my mind is seeing demos of direct note access in the new Melodyne. You can record a polyphonic instrument, then move around/pitchshift the individual notes of the chord later on. That shouldn't even be possible. It doesn't make sense. It's like baking a cake, and then being able to take the eggs back out of the cake, and put them back in the box.

Whoa!

Also, with Steinberg Voicemachine and I think Melodyne as well, you can alter formants, making a voice sound more masculine/feminine/childlike/whatever. My multimedia MSc sure was a lot of fun. Top of the range plugins installed on lab machines. Total waste of time, though.

What's really blown my mind is seeing demos of direct note access in the new Melodyne. You can record a polyphonic instrument, then move around/pitchshift the individual notes of the chord later on.

that's nuts, how is it even possible? do you have a link to those demos?

It's like discovering dark matter or something - jump to 1.30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFCjv4_jqAY

This, as the guy explains, is theoretically impossible, "but what is impossible in theory can work in practise" 0_o

Agus conas tá tú ecuador_with_a_c? Where did you do your MSc? I did one a few years ago in UCC - "multimedia": lol 90s!

bon iver showing u how to irl troll

Check the link again, he was actually making fun of the whiners.

Agus conas tá tú ecuador_with_a_c? Where did you do your MSc?

DCU - finished my comp. science degree just as the wheels came off the dot-com wagon. The masters was EU-funded so it was a no-brainer, really. Then I spent a year in a finance startup at the peak of Celtic Tiger v2, before finding my true calling as a biologist.

Got an email from a singer in a successful UK rock band that people can probably guess pretty easily, back in late 2005 when they were making their last album, which said "the computer guy's just making me sound like Art Garfunkel". Didn't really come over live.

oh man that video

Fuck me that's scary.

holy SHIT

I know, I didn't think they were still going in 2005!

They had a number 1 album, number 2 single, and fucking awful, career-ending number 3 England Official World Cup Football song in 2006. And then the singer went and bought a nighclub cos he'd had enough, and discovered the Ting Tings.

woah. long live the new flesh...i guess

(I know, jks bruv!)

Still, if it made No1, it must have been pretty good that autotune.

'discovered the Ting Tings'

come on now

oh my god this can't be possible

idk, the amount of work involved... you could always learn how to play guitar.

This idiot uses autotune a lot, singer of the worst band ever, Teen Hearts. Never seen a more punchable face:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kw8v4nt81J1qzzhzdo1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1265043375&Signature=bBvheNq5%2BJlxk7X2gOY/nSU/QjQ%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQDLetuU3JY

I apologize for not checking the search function first, this atrocity exhibition has already been posted in another thread. I guess it's not "indie" anyway . . .

i think morrissey is using it a lot of years of refusal, some notes on stuff just don't seem very realistic

if you're a decent singer it's pretty much transparent so why not correct your vocal recordings by those few cents that you were off in places? i think just about everyone uses it unless they're going for an intentionally sloppy vocal sound.

it's only noticable/bad when the singer relies on it to hit notes especially ones above their range

i dunno i always feel like i can hear a certain sorta weird tone to it..plus i dunno...humans generally sing like human beings i don't see what's wrong with it...or just do another take

and singers sounded better on the record than live long before autotune! when you're recording a vocal track you do a million takes and can piece together the best bits of each, etc.

yeah i know, but like...if everything sounds so much better now why do records sound so much worse?

and singers sounded better on the record than live long before autotune! when you're recording a vocal track you do a million takes and can piece together the best bits of each, etc.

― ciderpress, Sunday, January 31, 2010 5:36 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

even this is relatively recent. do a retake, learn to sing, or get a better singer. or just ian brown it out.

Even if the ability to easily splice together different takes is a recent innovation (wasn't impossible before, just difficult), punch-ins have been a standard part of recording for a long time.

i think the mistakes in music make it more interesting

like, beatles records are full of mistakes for instance

punch-ins have been a standard part of recording for a long time.

― zvincter (The Reverend), Sunday, January 31, 2010 7:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah... but they were often clunky and people generally seemed to have gone about their work with the view that "this is it." call me cranky mcoldgrump but i think that's a better approach than "busk it now and fix in the edit." similar to filmmaker's mania for "coverage."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvsE8gQv3_4

or just ian brown it out.

lol

The Direct Note Access thing, I absolutely love it and want it to happen, but I'm convinced it's vaporware. There have been videos showing it off for two or three years now and every time they get called out in a audio magazine or something they release a new video. But the software mysteriously has never leaked in all that time.

Isn't it already available? http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=products_editor

...call me cranky mcoldgrump but i think that's a better approach than "busk it now and fix in the edit."

I've seen a producer fix someone's vox in the couple of minutes whilst the singer's dicking about between takes. Autotune and suchlike are a really seamless part of the process now, for better or worse, not even something that gets worked on after everything else. I would prefer more 'bad' singing though.

The Sound on Sound review of the Melodyne direct note editing said it was good for some stuff, but left really audible artifacts with even small changes on other material.

That's Melodyne, the standard tune correction software, which does single notes. It does it really really well, but it doesn't split up fully arranged songs into individual instruments or full chords into individual notes. The DNA thing supposedly will be able to, say, plug in a Beatles song, and change every chord in it to minor chords, or something like that. The DNA thing was supposed to be in a future version of Melodyne for years now.

I'm guessing you didn't click the link then?

It's in the version that's out now: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec09/articles/melodynedna.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuqIgTfmPr8

good god was that intentional ?

that was some T Pain style shit happening

but he hit all the notes anyway but ended up sounding like a clown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piNiD7pSEro

if the DNA Editor thing is already out, why is youtube not inundated with fucked up versions of popular songs in which all the chords are different & whatnot

It really only works on a single recorded instrument at a time; you could dick around with the notes in a guitar or piano chord say. Messing with a entire mixed song sounds like shit usually.

Hmm. Well, that makes sense. I would expect it to sound like shit, but this whole DNA program blows my mind to begin with.

Animal Collective uses autotune, right?

Do Owl City count as indie?

anyone?

Hm, might this Melodyne DNA stand any chance of separating a vocal track from a guitar track? Have some 4-track stuff I was fancying digging out again for another poke at but on the song I had plans for acoustic guitar is on same track as vocals. Had a bit of a go using Adobe Audition's fancy spectral selection mode but results were more interesting than usable.

Animal Collective probably use AutoOutOfTune.

Does it seem like Sick Mouthy is using AutoAnCoBacklash a lot recently?

the thing is with all this stuff is that it's effects on how music sound are really subtle...people use words like "it's transparent" a lot, but frankly i think there's a very subtle but very profound effect that it has.

*also this isn't the same as punching in, that's not a good comparison

it's like this:

there's really no good argument i could make that wouldn't sound like i was a stodgy old man, and maybe increasingly. when you argue against it, well there's always really easy ways to refute what you are saying...oh it's just the same as tape splicing..or punch-ins...or tape editing was back then, etc etc etc

^and all these are RIGHT..that's the problem. like i admit the things i feel are true to me on an emotional level, not a logical one.

but...and i really believe this to be true, is that right now what we have is that all this kind of tech makes for a million little decisions to be made in the recording process, a nip here, a tuck there....and like i said it's "transparent"...it's easier, it's progress, so there's no reason not to make any of the million decisions...in fact, not making them would be silly really

but then at a certain point, i think the sum of all these decisions hits a certain point where the recording just loses any sense of life - actually the first record i mentioned on this thread, Morrissey's Years of Refusal, is a great example of this - a dead quality that pretty much makes it impossible for me to really engage with it as music.

i guess the best way to explain might be the audio version of the uncanny valley.

or basically there are a lot of albums now that sound like nicole kidman's face looks.

actually the first record i mentioned on this thread, Morrissey's Years of Refusal, is a great example of this - a dead quality that pretty much makes it impossible for me to really engage with it as music.

You sure it doesn't have more to do with Morrissey being a washed-up, eternally dramatic old codger recycling the same old reworded adolescent lyrical themes? Going through the motions more so than a So You Think You Can Dance routine?

I say this as a Smiths fan who also appreciates Morrissey's solo work until, say, 1992 era.

no obv he can't write for shit anymore...but compare how this record sounds to, say, another shit record like maladjusted and maladjusted sounds way better...i'm talking specifically about jerry finn's production

M@tt's last post = one of the best things I've read on ILM in a long time

xpost ok 2nd to last post

Yeah, that was a great post.

You guys should read some of the links here Brian Eno Interview, where Eno says some similar stuff.

kinda off-topic but possibly revealing about the state of autotune use in pre-2000 indie:
I've been saying for years that this song is dripping in autotune but people always just sorta looked at me funny... I'm totally 100% right about this though aren't I dudes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr_s6-Q7f00

I listened to, and thoroughly enjoyed, The Fall be Kind EP just yesterday, actually.

:-) That's good news to me Nick. I think I prefer it on the whole to Merriweather. What's your opinion on Sung Tongs, if you have one?

Of course he has one.

Re: Ben Folds

Woah! It's not even subtle at all! How did I not notice before?

Also- god, that guy is so corny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sq1LbDKDQ4

ben folds is considered indie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkn0NybXUQ

eh?