Hometracked » freeplugins

Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music – 10 Examples

des — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:45:58 +0000

Pitch correction software has applications from restoration and mix-rescue to outright distortion of a voice or instrument. I’ll discuss some of the more tasteful uses of these auto-tune tools (whether the original from Antares, or a variant like the free GSnap) below. But first I thought I’d highlight their misuse to illustrate the effects we usually try to avoid.

So, listen here to 10 of pop music’s most blatant auto-tune abuses:

[download MP3]

If you’re unfamiliar with Auto-tune, and especially if you listen to much pop and rock, you might not hear it initially. When overdone, the effect yields an unnatural yodel or warble in a singer’s voice. But the sound is so commonplace in modern mainstream music that your ears may have tuned out the auto-tune!

The songs in this clip, in order, and the phrases most affected by auto-tuning to help you spot them:

Dixie Chicks – The Long Way Around – Noticeable on “parents” and “but I.”

T-Pain – I’m Sprung – Especially obvious on “homies” and “lady.”

Avril Lavigne – Complicated – Listen to “way,” “when,” “driving,” “you’re.”

Uncle Kracker – Follow Me
The whole vocal sounds strained, but especially the word “goodbye.”

Maroon 5 – She Will Be Loved – Listen for “rain” and “smile.”

Natasha Bedingfield – Love Like This – “Apart” and “life.”

Sean Kingston – Beautiful girls – “OoooOver” doesn’t sound human.

JoJo – Too Little Too Late – Appropriately, “problem” stands out.

Rascal Flatts – Life is a Highway
Every vocal, foreground and background, is treated, but “drive” in particular.

New Found Glory – Hit or Miss – “Thriller”, and every time Jordan sings “I.”

The Cher Effect

When used noticeably, an auto-tuner produces what most call “The Cher Effect“, named for her trademark sound in the song Believe*. (In essence, we named the effect like scientists naming a new disease after its first victim.) Treated this heavily, a vocal track sounds synthetic, and obviously processed.

But not all auto-tuning is so blatant. In the sample above, it’s harder to hear the pitch correction on Uncle Kracker and Avril than on T-Pain and Bedingfield.

Tasteful Uses

As with any tool, a little care can yield great results. Some simple things to keep in mind about pitch correction tools:

Performance: Most importantly, an auto-tuner isn’t a shortcut to a perfect performance. If you can’t sing the song properly, no amount of post-processing will make it sound like you did. So when your pitch matters, and you don’t want to correct it with an effect, you’ll need to work on your performance until it’s right.
Less is more: The fewer notes you correct, the less obvious your use of an auto tuner will be. Consider automating the plugin so it acts only when most needed.
Graphical mode: If your pitch correction software offers a graphical mode (like Antares Auto-Tune and Melodyne,) learn how to work with it. The default “auto” modes are OK for basic corrections, but often produce noticeable yodeling.
Backing vocals: In general, you can get away with more pitch correction on backing vocals than lead vocals.
Outdated: Obvious vocoder-style autotuning is dated, and borders on kitschy. The synthetic warbling vocal sound marks songs as having come from a specific era, the same way gated-reverb on drums instantly places a song in the 1980′s. Remember: If you make the auto tuner obvious, people will say your song uses “the Cher effect.” Let this be a guideline.

Be sure it’s needed

Two songs have auto tuners on my mind today: Snoop’s Sensual Seduction (because of Anil Dash’s ruminations on the death of the analog vocoder,) and Natasha Bedingfield’s Love Like This, which I heard on the radio. In the former, the auto tuner is clearly a gimmick. But every time I hear Bedingfield’s song, I’m struck by the same question: Why do that to her voice?

She’s a fantastic singer, and once you’ve heard the song without the cheesy auto tuner effect, it’s hard to take the radio single seriously.

And there’s a lesson in that for home recordists, (even those of us who don’t write pop music,) which echoes the rule of mixing: If an effect significantly changes the sound of a track, especially one so important as the lead vocal, be sure that change improves the song before committing it to the mix.

…

See Also: The Rule of Mixing

…

For more home recording tips,
Subscribe to the Hometracked feed, or receive email updates.

Link dump

des — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:43:53 +0000

Here are some pages open in my browser that I haven’t had a chance to write up:

Backman is a free VST (Windows only) plugin that “Reverses incoming audio signal in sync (it will follow host BPM)… especially useful on live gigs to make that ‘back spin’ effect.“

Grammys exclude popular independent artists.

Yet there is no part of me that can really believe that these awards didn’t have something to do with an agenda, political or otherwise. If the Dixie Chicks were the cream of the crop – the absolute pinnacle of music – for 2006, then it’s no wonder that record sales are stalling.

Findsounds is a straight forward search engine for finding sound files (as opposed to music files) on the web. It’s a great tool if you need sound effects, like a chorus of squirrels, for a song.

Brad (of Brad Sucks) developed an online store for selling DRM-free files, and he’s offering the code for everyone’s use (though you’ll need an Amazon S3 account, and a Paypal account:)

I needed a cheap, DRM-free digital download store so I wrote this quickly over a few days. Then I thought it’d be useful for other artists. It was created to sell music but any files will work. Authors, photographers and artists could use it as well.

Walls of Sound: Investigating the greatest recording studios in the world to find out what gives certain studios a magical aura.

Tip: Phase inversion to hear small changes

des — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:37:17 +0000

As amateurs, learning to use effects like reverb and compression, we’re often told “bring the effect up until it’s just noticeable in the mix.” Sometimes, this is easier said than done. We’re amateurs after all, and often we haven’t yet learned how an effect is supposed to sound in the mix. How can we judge “just noticeable” when we don’t know what we’re listening for?

Practice and experience are the sure-fire methods, of course. But if your recording environment lets you invert the phase of a track, there’s a simple trick you can use to make small changes more obvious.

Because of phase cancellation, when you mix a track with a phase-inverted copy of itself, the two tracks cancel each other out and you hear silence.

However, if you then make a small change to one of the tracks, they’ll no longer cancel each other completely. Instead you’ll hear the parts that don’t cancel out, or effectively the difference between the two tracks. You can use this to hear when an effect has altered the sound of a track by even the smallest “just noticeable” amount.

The concept is straightforward: By mixing the effected track with an inverted copy of the original, you’ll hear the difference introduced by the effect.

And the process for applying this concept is straightforward too: Duplicate the audio track, and invert the phase of the second track. (Like this, in Sonar)

Note the phase-invert button on the second track has been activated. In most DAWs, including Sonar and Cubase, the phase-invert button is denoted by the greek letter phi. As stated above, if you play the two tracks at this point you’ll hear nothing, since they cancel each other out.

Now, on the first track, add the effect you wish to monitor. Adjust the effect a small amount. As you raise its level, the two tracks will increasingly differ, and since they no longer completely cancel each other out, you’ll hear that difference.

Further, you can mute the second track to remove the phase cancellation altogether, and hear how the first track sounds with the effect applied. With some practice, flipping between the original track, the effected track, and the combination which highlights the difference, you’ll get better at judging when an effect is just noticeable.

Here’s a contrived example illustrating the process I used to convince myself that Magneto, a tape emulator, was in fact altering the sound of the tracks I applied it to. (Here’s a screenshot of the Magneto settings I used.)

[download MP3]

The clip contains 3 repetitions of a riff, as shown below. First, it’s the original riff. Then, with the effect applied, we hear the “phase cancelled” difference between both tracks. (So clearly, Magneto does something!)

And finally, we hear the effected riff, with no cancellation.

One last note: In the unlikely event that your DAW doesn’t have a phase-invert button, Flipper is a free VST plugin that will do the job for you.

…

For more home recording tips,
Subscribe to the Hometracked feed, or receive email updates.

Recording Phil Collins

des — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:08:33 +0000

Mix Magazine’s Classic Tracks looks at Phil Collins, and the recording of Face Value:

The famous drum fill, Collins contends, could have been anything. What is on the record is what came out at the moment. “When people talk about the ‘Phil Collins drum sound,’ that is actually a huge variety of drum sounds,” Collins says. “We never left the setup; we always broke it down and started again so we could end up somewhere different. The Townhouse Studio actually wasn’t that live. It was quite tall, but not really a big room — probably smaller than most people’s bedroom. The Genesis studio we designed had a much livelier, bigger room, glass and reflective surface. So when you listen to “In the Air Tonight,” it is not really that live, it’s big. The snare drum and tom toms kind of bark, but it is made from a lot of compression with ambient mics as far away from the drums as possible, and those are noise-gated.”

Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham are generally credited with pioneering the use of SSL’s talkback mic compressor as a drum channel compressor, and it’s a huge component of Collins’ drum sound on Face Value. (SSL now offers the talkback compressor as a free plugin.)

But distinctive as his drums (and famous drum roll) are, with In The Air Tonight Collins actually relied on drum machines, at least up to the point where “all hell lets loose”