Modern Music's Death By Auto-Tune

hey everyone i'm rick biatto so this video i've been meaning to make for years really and it's about auto tune i'm gonna state right up front i'm not anti-auto-tune auto-tune has saved me on many sessions let me give you a little history of my use of auto-tune so back in the early 2000s auto-tune came out in 1997 but back in the early 2000s i was producing a lot of bands all right this is rick beyonce how's it going man all right dude good to meet you my name is rick beato i would have bands that have a budget to come in and do maybe five songs and they would have five days to do it it'd be monday or maybe six days it'd be monday through saturday but by the end of saturday we'd had to have the entire song group of songs mixed because i had a new project coming in on monday to do the same thing again most of the singers couldn't do the vocals they couldn't do them perfectly right they just they they could do them pretty close but you'd have notes that they couldn't reach or get late at night and they've done a lot of vocals they just didn't have it in their voice so you'd go in with auto-tune and you touch up things you get a high note here get a note here in the verse maybe they didn't sing the melody quite right so you'd kind of change one of the notes by a half step or something you could do and get away with it nobody would really notice double track it they definitely wouldn't notice when i first heard autotune it's really the severe auto tune this was actually i remember where i was i was in nrg studios in los angeles which is a great great studio and i heard this song come on and i was like what is that now all of you know what that is that's cher [Music] listen this was really the first time that people heard autotune as a matter of fact it was referred to as the share effect at that time because when you hear it here in the verse it was used as an effect [Music] and when we thought oh is that a vocoder or something vocoder is a another type of vocal effect and i remember the engineer saying no that's auto-tune that's a plug-in what's that said well basically you can go in and just tune the notes right to a pitch grid and it just snaps the notes to a grid and it makes it perfectly in tune but it takes all the character out of it so it sounds computerized it's like interesting the next thing that i heard was right after that i was uh in the same session i heard this song [Music] lenny kravitz [Music] i remember saying the engineer is that auto-tune he says yeah i think that's auto-tune on those background vocals those yeahs i said because that does not sound natural those yeah it sounds really weird it sounds too perfectly in tune and it makes it sound small listen again [Music] there's something really unnerving about it it's so tuned that it sounds small when you have a three-part harmony like that if all the notes are perfectly in tune it does make it sound small what you want to do is have one of the notes be a little bit sharp one of those be a little flat one of those being dead on in tune i'm talking just increments just a couple cents here and there but it makes it sound huge once you put everything right on the grid line it just sounds unnatural especially when it's the same person's voice and that's obviously lenny kravitz doing the same part three different times and each one is tuned really to the nth degree where it's just flat lined so that's why it sounds so unnatural i mean i like lenny kravitz but every time i hear that it drives me nuts it also drives me nuts that he rhymes away with a way i want to get away i want to fly away that's not really a rhyme anyways you have people like the king of auto-tune t-pain right t-pain made his career on auto-tune and it's a really creative use of auto-tune i'm not anti-auto-tune i'm anti using auto-tune to fix everything and making every voice sound like a computer let me give you some other examples here the song i mean you can hear it it sounds like a computer voice right it doesn't sound like a real human being because it's not because it's been run through an algorithm that makes it a synthesized representation [Music] that's a really creative use of it or else the weekend with save your tears once again that's used as an effect it sounds like a keyboard now is it going to sound interesting 10 years from now i actually wrote this down the other day on my phone this is about autotune a synthesized digitized derivative of your voice your voice is imperfect the imperfections in your playing or in your singing is what gives it character autotune and melodyne robs the performer of their unique humanity and emotion and it's the reason that i believe performances won't and haven't held up over time autotune has become so common today that people will come into the studio and they'll sing like they have auto-tune on their voice already because they're just so used to hearing it this is maroon 5. this is a to me an attempt to make it sound like he's not using auto-tune but it's heavily auto-tuned that's like that's one of the things about maroon 5 about adam levine's voice that really from their first record on is has always been heavily auto tuned i mean i know it's part of the sound but it's not anything that i really care for personally i just don't like that sound because it always sounds like a computerized voice as a matter of fact my kids that's what they say this isn't like sounds like a robot voice and it really does rob the person of their humanity so what did people used to do before autotune well they would sing it until they got it right and typically the singers were actually just better singers frankly they could sing more in tune because the only people that got record deals were people that could perform live and they were great singers that's why you had your freddie mercuries and your robert plants and your chris cornell's i mean people that had phenomenal pitch and could perform the things live now in the 80s we started having pitch shifters pitch shifters could actually change the pitch of a note or harmonizers whatever you want to call it so what producers did then and started hearing it with people like paula abdul who whose pitch was really not great and her singles she would have attitude notes and what the producer would do is they'd get a vocal comp and then they would open up a blank track on the multi-track tape machine they'd find a pitch a note that was out of pitch and they'd say you know that's really flat let's raise it up uh 15 cents and they would listen and it's still a little flat how about 25 cents okay that sounds good they would bounce it onto the blank track and they would create their comp track the comp means compiled track from multiple takes and then every note if it was sharp oh let's bring it down five cents is that it still bring it down 10 cents okay that's good and they would comp the track like that a lot of pop music would have fixed vocals in that way but they were nothing like they are nowadays where everything other than the most indie of indie rock or metal has auto tune on it and frankly when i listen down to these spotify top 10 countdowns most of the rock songs have auto tune on them some of them have have really obvious autotune and once again autotune can be used great there's plenty of bands that used it in metal or in rock over the last 20 years that would use it subtly and it would be a really cool effect typically bands that would have djs in them and they would have other electronic sounds so it wouldn't sound out of place in nashville they call it pitch and pocketing pitch meaning somebody that auto tunes or melodynes the vocal and pocketing is somebody that goes through and fixes the rhythm quantizes the drum parts and auto tunes the vocals to a grid let me give you some examples of things that are not auto-tuned [Music] without any type of pitch bends like that auto-tune would sound weird now can it be done yes you can auto-tune those things you could actually follow the shape of those notes and tune them but they didn't need to this was done in 1994 it came out here's another example from a video i just did [Music] no auto-tune no auto-tune needed seal's a phenomenal singer [Music] or [Music] freddie mercury i actually have a theory that freddie mercury had perfect pitch because there's no way that he could have sung all those vocals perfectly in tune layer after layer without having perfect pitch but i'm going to get to that when i make my video on bohemian rhapsody or one of the best examples joni mitchell joni mitchell come on no need of auto-tune okay we're going to do an experiment here i'm going to take that yeah part from the fly song by lenny kravitz and i'm just gonna sing one note out of tune and create that three-part harmony to show you how ridiculous auto-tune is how actually amazing it is but how people do this okay so here's how we're gonna do it the three chords in that three-part harmony from the lenny kravitz song are c g d but i've sung the note g three times way out of tune i'll play the the main vocal part listen this horrible right okay now i'm gonna engage auto-tune and you're gonna see the red lines here show you the pitches there's a very sharp g you see the line for g here see that red line that's the note that i sang you can see i'm singing above the g but i've tuned it so in the green here is the tune note once again here and then i've moved this last g way down to f sharp down a half step so you're going to hear it it's going to sound in tune listen almost like i can actually sing well this is how they do it next i'm going to take the second part you get the idea i'm gonna bring up the tuned notes and i'm gonna go e d d look how far i'm moving the notes i'm moving from this very sharp g down to e and then from this g way down a fourth to the note d now listen i'll play the two parts together and i'm gonna do the same thing with the third part here's the third part [Music] so all three parts are just the same auto-tune g but i'm going to tune this one even more radically as you can see you can't even see the d the the g is way up here and i've tuned it down to c b a long long distance now here's what they all celebrate together this is how singers that sing attitude live sound good in the studio if you've ever gotten a gig and said man do they sing badly this actually used to happen now they just use auto-tune live okay so just to reiterate i'm not anti-auto-tune auto-tune has saved many a sessions but when it's used in every single song and the producers don't even try to have the singers actually sing it perfectly meaning do as many takes as you need to to get it right it's just laziness honestly and what it does it just robs the people of their own sound and you don't really hear the blues anymore because blues is about being in between the pitches you know like a blues note is not perfectly in tune i used to have this saying pitch is a place not an area and i would joke around with the singers because they wouldn't you know if they would not sing it too then i started realizing it's like no pitch is actually an area not a place i was i got it completely backwards once autotune came into the picture and you want it to be an area anything that's perfectly tuned especially harmony parts that are just tuned they sound small okay so you want to actually have things be out of tune a little bit so it choruses that's why you don't want to have your double tracks be auto tuned as well have the person sing it and then sing along with with what they've sung and then it'll sound like a proper double track because in an effort to sing it in tune with the other one they will sing slightly out of tune so they can hear themselves otherwise it'll chorus and phase and sound really weird so they'll be naturally double tracking it because that double track relies on the two pitches being slightly different that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbiota.com follow me on instagram at rickbiota1 check out the new beatto ear training program at beautiertraining.com and if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 1,139,923

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, music, music theory, music production, auto tune, music production for beginners, music production software, sung badly, pop music, pro tools, T pain, autotune vs no autotune, autotune sucks, travis scott, 100 gecs, daft punk, techno music, singers without autotune, singers, off key songs, off key singing, logic pro x, fake singing, ableton, why autotune is ruining music, why autotune is bad, why autotune is good, how to use autotune

Id: NNXg5dIVC1M

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021