The Problem With Auto-Tune

this video is brought to you by viewers like you thanks for supporting all my weird rants so back in may of this year inkfire asked is there a music theory you'd like to debunk or wish that you could and yeah there is i think people get really confused by auto-tune the argument tends to be oh so-and-so can't sing they have no musical ability so they have to use a computer to do it for them it's cheating something something t-pain and this is where things get kind of complicated because i don't think auto-tune means what people really think it means back in 97 a research engineer called andy hildebrad phd along with antares audio technologies came out with a plug-in that could alter the pitch of a vocal or instrumental track and called it auto-tune but this was the birth of something called pitch correction the original idea with this auto-tune was that like if you messed up one note during a take you could go back fix that one note and then you wouldn't have to redo the whole take but a year later in 98 share and her production team thought cool what if we just turned that up to 11 and that's exactly what they did for shares believe in turning the plug-in up to its absolute maximum setting there was this super artificial distorted effect that came through on the vocal track and immediately this became known as the share effect that was until t-pain here's the thing about t-pain t-pain is a better vocalist than you or i will ever be he keeps putting out these acoustic covers of himself singing and they're just insane the whole point of that quote-unquote auto-tuned sound was that he was using the auto-tune plug-in to imitate a digital version of a talkbox or even a vocoder kinda like what you'd hear with acts like zap and roger stevie wonder or jorjo ladies and gentlemen you're watching videos [Music] is the whole idea was that this was an effect no one anywhere was ever convinced that this was his actual voice and that he was having to way overshoot the plug-in because he was somehow so bad at singing that this was the only way they could make his voice sound remotely musical if you're just trying to touch up some out of tune parts of your performance and this is what you end up with fire your engineer see and here's the part that really sucks about all this everyone gives t-pain all this crap about using these effects but no one has ever said a word about daft punk sure deaf punk uses talk boxes and vocoders but no one has ever accused them of using those techniques to cover up their bad singing no one has ever questioned their musicianship even when they go on the grammys and just push buttons for six minutes straight meanwhile t-pain is over here on national television in a stupid mascot outfit just trying to prove to people that he can actually sing as i was making this video people were still calling him out on twitter and making fun of him in auto tune it is so not okay and here's where i think a lot of people get confused auto tune began as a form of pitch correction the ability to fix a note here and there in the studio but with acts like sharon t-pain everyone now knows auto-tune is that artificial effect but pitch correction still exists and it sounds nothing like cher or t-pain the golden rule of pitch correction is more or less that you shouldn't really be able to tell it's there at all if you know it's got some kind of pitch correction in it then you kind of did it wrong at which point everyone everywhere is always like ah what about cher what about tpm what about blah blah yes you can hear the auto-tune effect but that's what it is in effect they're doing that on purpose they aren't using it to correct a slightly out of tune performance they're letting the plugin work on autopilot on purpose it's auto pitch correction or auto tune but here's the thing about pitch correction everything gets pitch corrected nowadays everyone everything everywhere i know instrumental cover artists who use melodyne on their youtube covers i'm not gonna list them here because they get mad and that's kind of what i want to talk about it's so ubiquitous that i don't even know for a fact that the people i'm showing on screen have used pitch correction but i have no problem insinuating that they have because it's in literally 99 of everything that everyone listens to turn on radio if it's on the radio some aspect of it has most likely seen pitch correction not necessarily auto-tune that specific plug-in it might be melodyne or something else and again we're not talking about that super harsh artificial effect by turning it up all the way we're talking about pitch correction something that by design you aren't really supposed to notice and here's where we get into a real problem because people think that those who use auto-tune not pitch correction but auto-tune are being dishonest they're somehow cheating they didn't put in the time and effort to learn how to sing so they're using a computer to do it for them and they're cheating the system a lot of people work really really hard for their dreams but it's not meant for everybody that's why you use auto-tune and i don't some people in the industry like to talk about pitch correction like it's the audio equivalent of photoshop which i can totally agree with but for me i like thinking about it a little more like it's makeup and just like how some people think that wearing makeup is dishonest like you're lying about your appearance or something some people like to think that using auto-tune or pitch correction is covering up the truth so to speak kesha isn't as good as a musician as taylor swift because swift put in the work to be able to sing and kesha didn't except that yes kesha can actually sing this is just an effect [Music] but think about it complaining about t-pain and kesha using that over-tuned auto-tune effect is kind of like walking up to somebody and saying i can't believe that your eyelids aren't actually blue how could you lie to me like that like no neckbeard it's an effect that's how it works if you're somebody who is sincerely concerned about whether or not someone's using pitch correction you don't need to worry about the people who are making it obvious your concern should be with the multi-million dollar artists that make it sound like they aren't there is a side to pitch correction that gives people with less practice the ability to sound like they're more in tune than they actually are but the whole point of pitch correction is to sound like it's not there it's the nude look of music you are actually wearing makeup but the guys who complain about girls who wear too much makeup can't actually tell but believe it or not this has actually been an issue for a really long time way before autotune ever came out like way back when if you were in a musical movie and you couldn't sing they would just dub your voice with somebody else's have you ever seen singing in the rain the whole point of that story is that these three characters figure out how to dub someone's voice the whole plot is that an actress who's a really great silent film actress doesn't have a voice for the new talkies and i make a point in showing how she just doesn't have it she's impossible to train and so in a mean-spirited turn they dub her voice with debbie reynolds here without her ever knowing then the film has to go off on a tangent justifying their choices by randomly turning the victim of the show into the villain only to have this big triumphant moment at the end where they all reveal that debbie reynolds is the real singer the problem is that debbie reynolds didn't actually sing in this film they dubbed her with not one but two other actresses betty noyes and gene hagan who played the villain of the film that was originally supposed to be dubbed by debbie reynolds it's gene hagen dubbing debbie reynolds dubbing gene hagan and neither betty noyes nor gene hagan were credited for their voices in the film and this used to happen a lot like audrey hepburn and my fair lady getting dubbed by marnie nixon natalie wood in west side story getting dubbed by marnie nixon or deborah kerr and the king and i getting dubbed by marnie nixon if you're interested in the history of movie dubbing musical theater match has a really great video on the subject speaking of which this wasn't just limited to the movies remember millie vanilli if you know millie vanilli was his duo from munich that were internationally famous for being complete frauds after an interview on mtv exposed how bad their english was there were questions about whether or not they'd actually sung on their album and during a live performance a bug in the system caused the line to loop over and over again revealing that the two have been lip syncing to someone else's performance i wanted to die it's stopped good you know it's gone you know it's good eighty thousand people girl you know it's scary there's a similar criticism levied at new kids on the block the rumor was that they didn't actually do any singing in their new album and that they were all lip-syncing on stage their manager booked them a gig on the arsenio hall show just to prove the rumor wrong and uh they ended up not giving a super stellar performance [Music] more recently in 2004 ashley simpson had a similarly embarrassing moment on snl where it was revealed that she was lip-syncing her performance she did about three seconds of a cottony joe dance and then ran off to see if she could catch a career before it jumped off an overpass so the thing is that with all this betrayal of trust people have been super on edge to see if their favorite artists were deceiving them to see if they were actually capable of performing the music that was on the album but here's the problem with that no one is capable of pulling off what they do on the album see since things are so overproduced nowadays no one can actually sound like they do in the recording live on stage unless it's literally just one dude in a guitar like even when they aren't actually pitch correcting the performers what they'll do is they'll take about a dozen takes of them singing the same song over and over again and then they'll go through syllable by syllable and pick out the absolute best combinations of sounds to make the perfect take so even if a track isn't pitch corrected it's such an unreasonably perfect performance that no one is ever going to be able to replicate it on stage so even if it is just one dude in a guitar there's still a good chance that he might make a mistake because you know he's a human but for these highly produced albums what that means is that you either have to lip sync or accept that the performance just isn't going to be top quality and just be sure to put on a good dance routine but this creates a massive misunderstanding when it comes to what pitch correction is and how it functions instead of doing 12 takes you can maybe do three and then just shave off those rough parts which helps expedite the production process but there's a problem with all of this nowadays you can pitch corrective performance in real time you can pitch correct someone while they're singing live on stage you can't even go to a live concert anymore and be guaranteed that they aren't using pitch correction live through the performer's mic you can pitch correct things in real time on stage and you'll never even know the difference literally the only way to know that someone isn't being corrected live on stage is if there isn't a microphone which is kind of an ethical dilemma if you pay money to see someone sing live and you hear a process version of their voice have you really heard them sing live if a tree falls in the woods and someone auto tunes it does it make a sound one dead giveaway that there's pitch correction is when people are dancing you just cannot give a good vocal performance while you're moving like that you're gonna run out of breath [Music] when you're watching bts perform live they're using a sophisticated system of backtracks and live pitch correction that will swap sidechain and mix out with one another so that when the performers elect to actually sing instead of lip syncing it'll all come together in a cohesive performance it's really subtle but you can tell if you pay attention so the thing is that like yeah it's still never as good as what you hear on the album unless they are literally actually lip syncing to what you hear on the album but in any other circumstance their performance might still be pitch corrected live to help them out if they choose to sing instead of lip sync but here's where things get even more complicated let's say that you're someone in the deep recesses of the absolute worst parts of hollywood and you're seeing all this stuff unfold with auto-tune and share and all that and because you're deep in the worst parts of showbiz you need to have a pretty face with a pretty voice well now suddenly you don't need to completely replace the voice of an actor or an actress who can't really sing now you can give your actors enough of an edge to pass on screen even if they have minimal voice training see like some of you might have noticed that in the early 2000s there was a massive burst of movie musicals beginning with moulin rouge in 2001 in chicago in 2002 phantom of the opera dream girls sweeney todd hairspray mamma mia les miz into the woods la la land now i don't actually have any hard proof of this i just find it a little conspicuous that suddenly in and around the late 90s and early 2000s hollywood just suddenly magically figured out how to get actors to sing well on screen like did anyone else notice that no one in any of these films were ever dubbed okay so maybe a little bit in phantom of the opera that doesn't really count i wonder if there is some kind of technological advancement in the late 90s and early 2000s that would have allowed for actors with little to no professional vocal training to suddenly succeed at singing on the big screen hmm yes i wonder indeed and this is where things get tricky because in 2012 cameron mcintosh figures hey i want to do it live and i want people to know that we're doing it live not pre-recorded but live on set performances but remember for like the last 30 or 40 years people have been inundated with really okay live performances or performances that are so edited that you're basically just listening to the album alongside the performers on stage and even then no one has been able to match what they can do note for note on the album and those are the performances that didn't have technical difficulties that were so problematic that it ended their careers so people have this association that genuine unedited live performances are always a little rougher than the pre-recorded ones but a live performance means that these people can sing they aren't cheating they're putting in the work and we're all listening to something pure and authentic so when people lined up to see les mis they liked that it was you know a little rough around the edges beneath the lash upon the rock audiences were enamored that it was all recorded live with no pitch correction or i guess what most people would call auto-tune like they knew that it was live because no one would ever edit a performance to sound like that people liked it so much that anne hathaway walked away with an oscar which if we're gonna bring that up we kind of need to address the elephant in the room aside from catherine zeta jones one best supporting actress in chicago and jennifer hudson who won best supporting actress and dream girls no one has ever won an oscar for these movie musicals oh there were a bunch of nominations even johnny depp got one for sweeney todd but no one ever actually won until hathaway did that live i dreamed a dream bit and when emma stone sang live for la la land but having these live performances and having people enjoy these live performances feels kind of insidious like if you're someone that thinks that pitch correction tricks you into enjoying somebody's voice the same way that makeup might make someone look more attractive and you think that that's a bad thing then having a performer kind of struggle live in front of a camera with absolutely no safety net is almost like a hashtag no filter moment we're looking at a natural performance in a world where everyone else is getting airbrushed and photoshopped and veneered and all kinds of other things that level the playing field in these moments musically speaking you're stripping these performers most of whom already aren't professional musicians of any and all advantages that you would otherwise give to any 12 year old on youtube but i threw you a little bit of a curveball there because emma stone wasn't originally going to be in la la land originally it was going to be emma watson who left production of la la land to go and be in beauty and the beast and we all know how that went now i know that i already talked about this film in a video that a couple of you saw but the truth is that this movie is the perfect way to explain what the real problem is with autotune listen to this interview with luke evans and try and see if anything sticks out to you now if i'm being completely honest i figured that they just pre-recorded all the audio just like a normal production on any other movie musical and that josh gad and luke evans had insisted on singing live maybe because they had a little bit of an ego about them from coming from the stage and all that but now that you've heard that check out this interview with emma watson you know at the beginning of the movie i was nervous to sing in front of like three people and by the end i was singing live in front of like 300. not just singing in front of 300 people but singing live in front of 300 people when would she be singing live in front of 300 people unless she meant this scene then just a few weeks ago i stumbled across this interview with frank wolfe the guy in charge of recording and mixing all the songs that appear in the film along with the underscore and this is what he had to say when it came to the lip sync of the film there were a few spots where the pre-recorded vocals were so far away from the lip sync that we ended up using on-set vocals actors are always encouraged to sing while lip-syncing otherwise it doesn't look like you're singing and this was recorded but working with onset vocals is a real challenge because you have to match the vocal sounds and also there always is extraneous noise as my upstairs neighbor stomps around his apartment and from this we can kind of see the issue coming together so here's the thing first off it is a nightmare to try and record vocals live on set check out my limits video if you don't believe me and when you look at the behind the scenes footage you can see them recording live on set with boom mics and you can also find footage of them all recording in the studio now i figured that those boom mics were to try and get like ambient noises footsteps some barn animal farting something like that i don't know like you can hear this massive thud when luke evans jumps off the bar and they kept that in the final cut of the film nobody fits like a stump i'm a special in a spitting match nobody fits like a stomach and secondly when you pre-record music it comes with some problems as well normally if you were making a an old school movie musical as a group of actors we'd go into a studio we'd record an album and then two months later we'd arrive on set and they would play the playback of our album and we would admire him alongside it the problem with that is that you have to make all your acting choices three months before you've even met the actor you're working with so when you're lip-syncing miming whatever in this kind of situation you aren't just singing the words but you have to act alongside a locked in performance now you'd honestly expect that to be no problem for musical theater veterans like josh gad and luke evans like he said doing eight shows a week for a living will teach you how to be consistent but even then you can see this live lip syncing thing become a little bit of a problem for josh gad and the gaston number when josh gad has this little like cadenza figure and the music kind of cuts out the lip sync is so off that they actually had to cut away from his face i haven't edited this at all this is exactly how it shows up in the film it just occurred to me that i'm illiterate and i've never actually had to spell it out loud before we're kind of seeing all the variations that can happen when you're both trying to sing live and listening to a performance that happened months ago and don't even bother bringing up dan stevens he was animated you can fudge the lip flaps whenever you're dealing with animation it's no big deal and i doubt anyone can sing well while wearing something like that but here's the thing about doing this weird dual pre-recording and then singing live thing if you're sitting there thinking well i'm gonna do the whole anne hathaway les mis thing and really gun it you're gonna give it your all you're gonna go for the absolute best performance possible which means that you're probably not gonna do a great job with the lip sync but if you're trying to focus on doing a good job with the lip sync to a performance that you did months ago there is no way you're going to be giving your best vocal performance and if you're then trying to take audio from onset aside from cutting out all the extraneous sounds like footsteps and animal farts and prop shuffling around which is already enough to make anyone sound like the third member of daft punk now you somehow have to manage to get a live performance to sound like it came out of a studio in order to match the performances that you got out of the rest of the cast even if you aren't working with these boom mics and everyone was lav-miked trying to get a lav mic on a live set to sound like a studio mic in a controlled environment is like trying to make iphone footage look like it belongs on an imac screen it's almost impossible and none of this even begins to take into consideration bending and warping each syllable one by one from both live and pre-recorded takes to try and get them into the lip sync that made it into the final cut of the film in fact in that same interview listen to what frank wolf said about moments like this we had a tricky moment in bell reprise for example where belle runs up that mountainside and where her singing and the tempo map of the orchestra were not quite comfortable together every time she turned around and you could not see her mouth we moved her vocals a bit to make it sit better with the orchestra we did things like that right up until the final mix now take a look at that scene in question as soon as she turns around and you hear the word life it sounds like they're switching from one vocal take to another [Music] if what i'm getting here is right what we're hearing is what would have happened if they took one of the other takes from anne hathaway's performance and then tried to edit that onto the face that made it into the final cut while also making it sound like she sang in a studio watson's performance isn't just auto-tuned or pitch-corrected it's just so heavily edited given the awkward circumstances that the end result sounds extremely artificial if it looks like she's being dubbed by her own voice that still isn't syncing entirely with the lip flaps it might be because that's actually what we're getting but why go through all this well if you're a director and you just saw that the 2012 production of les mis had their whole cast sing everything live and was nominated for eight oscars and won three of them but then saw that two years later in 2014 they pre-recorded all the music for into the woods and then they only got nominated for three and now there's a rumor that the film that your lead star just dropped out of to be here is gonna have their lead sing live you're probably thinking yourself well let's pre-record it just to be safe and then have them sing live on set and we'll see which one sounds better in post people seem to be interested in this realism thing and if we're going for a realistic remake where the engineer's daughter's the only woman in the village who knows how to read and she tries to break out of the castle then maybe a live performance would fit the tone better just like in les mis plus it just seems to be what audiences want the problem is that they didn't account for the lip syncing issue and singing live to a pre-recorded track which then created a problem with blending the pre-recorded live vocals together into this horrible artificial mess which on top of all of that would have made it unfathomably more difficult for someone with basically no professional singing experience it's one thing to practice and train to sing in a booth it's another gig entirely to get it live on set but when the trailer came out everyone blamed watson for the performance a classic fm presenter in soprano did an entire interview talking about what happened this audio engineering job made the news and she was like oh from the first two notes i knew that there was auto-tune auto-tune not pitch correction everyone recognized the artificiality that came out of editing the performances together and thought that it was auto-tuned which in their minds would only exist because emma watson couldn't sing she was cheating she must not have put in the work and was now using a computer as a shortcut for her vocal performance and let's pretend that that's actually what happened let's take a minute with all this and say that i'm wrong let's say that i'm just a butt hurt nerd trying to larp howard ashman's personal spirit of vengeance because i'm upset that they kind of screwed up a remake of one of my favorite movies let's say that everything i've come up with so far about this movie has been completely false watson's parts were all pre-recorded and they had to process the life out of it because she can't sing and i'm looking way too far into it even then no one said a thing about her performance in noah your father waits for me now clearly that is not a performance that saw any kind of pitch correction i don't think anyone would edit a performance to sound like that it was hashtag no filter but that's the issue no one will say anything about your performance if they think it's unedited you did it live that's just your voice you were brave to do it it doesn't matter how good your performance was but as soon as they detect a computer as soon as they think that you might be covering it up then suddenly it becomes this frenzy of so-and-so can't sing they're cheating they didn't put in the work they don't deserve the reward anyone who uses auto-tune is an effect or anyone who's involved in a production where they have to heavily edit a performance gets nothing but blame and shame but the awkward caveat to that is that all of those same people will let anyone who uses pitch correction in a subtle way slide right on by because most people don't even realize that it's there remember everyone gets pitch corrected nowadays everyone if you're mad about people cheating the system it's pitch correction that you should be upset about not auto-tune the problem with auto-tune is that people have been led to believe that it only exists in this highly artificial sound without realizing that pitch correction is in literally all of the music that they listen to and in trying to pursue something that they think is natural and authentic they both continue to engage in pitch-corrected music without realizing it while also fetishizing this kind of naked performance which puts extremely unrealistic and unfair expectations on performers which in turn has led to some really awkward musical movies where they just kind of leave their actors out in the cold to struggle on their own because people are just so used to seeing mistakes live that if it sounds too good it won't feel real to them and it works it's why we all had to look at jennifer hudson's boogers while she was dressed up like a cgi cat everyone just treats it like it's musical god mode like you flip a switch and suddenly you make good music singing in tune is something that every freshman has to learn how to do in every music school all over the country there are so many other things that go into making both a good piece of music and a good performance if auto-tune had the ability to magically make a bad piece of music good we never would have gotten friday clearly there's a limit to what auto-tune and pitch correction can actually accomplish so is pitch correction a bad thing it doesn't matter it's just like photoshop and airbrushing and makeup it's here and it's here to stay you might as well embrace it and see what kind of cool stuff you can do with it i honestly think that both auto-tune and pitch correction can be used to create really cool pieces of music i think it gives really creative and talented people opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise had and if people start making fun of you because they think that you're trying to hide the fact that you can't sing go on stage turn off the mic and prove them wrong would you would you sing something for them without auto-tune so we know what t-pain sounds like uh baby girl what's your name let me talk to you let me buy you a drink and an empty pain thanks for watching i like to thank all my patrons for making these videos possible with an extra special thank you to abe wintersheit alec kulikowski alex clinker always posh anthony didonato ben hillard bonzo pippen padula piscopolis the ninth captain casey charlie holly christian clara 10 darren aldrin edith with the man hands elise and thomas constantine for the alliance for the horde google it gregory holdenness hayden elsa hayden jondro i just want that one person to know that their fear isn't justified and people will still pay attention if they're honest about i want you to tell me if my fear is justified that no one will pay attention to me if i'm honest about my addiction to ice cream jason kim joe engel john egbert joseph spiros joshua park jordan adams jillian dubois karen rosenow keltier majors lauduina elizabeth the fourth the lanyard guy quentin goo mia dorothy michael hubbard mike wisnick mithlik dennick mohammed [ __ ] awoon myron john tataran nicholas cohen nicole e prelock rasputin russia's greatest machine martinez rich marzullo rick osborne ryan vick sideway tastic mr ben toliver heath tara femira transpanic power hour you are loved you are valid you deserve to live you are not the exception you shall call me pumpkin queen who am i wisdom inari and this symbol that google translates said was a tajik character that i can't figure out how to pronounce or to alphabetize i'm sorry and justin hurley and josh baktay i'd also like to thank inc fire for their really great request it's wonderful to finally have this auditing thing off my chest i had heard people arguing that certain tones would put people to sleep but i've never heard anybody trying to argue that you should put them in specific pieces of music that's actually really interesting we might have to revisit that one um if you like what you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on twitter twitch to have your musical questions answered live if you really like what i'm doing then consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's all i got for now thanks for watching

Channel: Sideways

Views: 1,237,800

Rating: 4.9058452 out of 5

Keywords: Auto, Tune, Autotune, Auto-tune, Pitch Correction, Pitch, Correction, Beauty and the Beast, Emma Watson, Belle, Audio Engineering, Singing in the Rain, Singin in the Rain, Dub, Live Performance, BTS, Cher, Kesha, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagan

Id: 05hTQC1CZko

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SXOSXO]

It's an interesting subject matter, but why is this video 30m long? It feels like every point it makes could easily be said in under 10m. There is too much stuff being repeated and bloviated.