Auto-Tune has since become a standard studio necessity, used in the majority of records made in nearly every genre of music for years. It has two modes: a graphical mode that lets engineers adjust pitch note-by-note and an automatic mode that pegs each sharp or flat to the nearest correct note. Newer versions have a Live mode that was introduced so singers could record with Auto-Tune already turned on, which is what artists like Future and T-Pain do.
Pitch correction was designed to be so subtle as to be unnoticeable, an effect achieved by gradual changes to the "adjustment time." Any setting below 15 or so begins to sound unnatural and robotic, according to Seth Firkins, an audio engineer whose primary client is Future. What people generally mistake as the singer being particularly off-key—the robotic, pronounced style of Auto-Tune made famous by T-Pain—is actually made by setting the adjustment time to zero, making the shift so abrupt that it's obvious. To some, that sound has become a sort of audio punchline, signifying mediocre artistry at work, or gags like
Auto-Tuning the news. The technology may make it easy for anybody to hit a note, but using it properly and creatively is another matter.
The most common mistake made by Auto-Tune rookies comes when the tool isn't set to the same key as the instrumental track. “It's not as much of a crutch as people think it is,” T-Pain says. “It's more of a corrective tool, just like reverb or delay or any kind of equalizer or compression.” Contrary to popular belief, Auto-Tune won't automatically make a song fit any desired melody; it will only peg what you sing to the closest in-key note. “If you want two or three notes up," T-Pain advises, "you're going to have to sing that.”
Hildebrand is unwilling to take responsibility for all that his technology has wrought. He compares his invention to building a car that other people then chose to drive down the wrong side of the highway, and argues that a vocalist using Auto-Tune properly is no different than a musician investing in a well-made instrument that's easier to tune. Firkins explains that even the most talented singers need it some of the time and would be arbitrarily holding themselves back to abstain from using it.
“It's gotten such a bad name for so long because it's like 'Oh, you use Auto-Tune?' Yeah, of
course you use Auto-Tune,” he says. “You're singing into six-, seven-thousand-dollar microphones, they didn't have
those in the '60s… If technology comes along that improves a sound, that improves workflow or performance or overall feel, then you use it. It doesn't mean you're not talented. It means you're talented
and somebody has the foresight to apply some great technology to your project. That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing.”
Auto-Tune has not only changed the way music is made, it's also shaped the way music is heard. Hildebrand pointed out that we're all pretty much used to hearing our pop music vocals perfectly in tune now, which can make older music—even classic oldies by The Beatles or the Beach Boys—sound somewhat grating. By changing what we listen for, Auto-Tune really may have ruined music in a certain sense. Some critics have argued that Auto-Tune threatens to homogenize the vocal idiosyncrasies that define many of our most beloved singers. Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday were interesting precisely because they weren't conventionally "good" singers. So by making all singers sound the same, Auto-Tune risks achieving the opposite reaction.
Which is where Future comes in. Or, to take things back, where Cher comes in. The British producer Mark Taylor was working with Cher on her 1998 album Believe. During a studio session Cher mentioned hearing a telephone vocal effect on TV that she really liked. Taylor had just bought the Auto-Tune plug-in, shortly after it first came out, and that night he began playing around with it and discovered the zero setting. He applied the effect to Cher's vocals, and nailed the ethereal tone they were searching for. “I think I've got something that's amazing but I'm not sure I can play it to you,” he remembered telling Cher the next morning. Then he put it on.
“She just went: 'that's fukking awesome,'” Taylor recalls. They put the effect on a few words, including part of the hook, and the song “Believe” became a smash hit. Producers and engineers immediately wanted to know how Taylor had done it, but he was evasive. In an interview with the producer trade publication
Sound on Sound,
he claimed the effect was a trick he had pulled off with a Vocoder, even though he knew there was only one way to get that specific sound.
“At the time it seemed like such a radical thing I thought, 'You need to find it,'” he said. While today it seems entirely normal, the “Cher effect” was once considered revolutionary and strange. “I remember thinking at the time 'This really is such a groundbreaking effect that doesn't come along every day,'” he adds with evident amazement.
After the success of “Believe,” Taylor consciously distanced himself from the effect. Today he's slightly skeptical of what he sees as the overuse of Auto-Tune, explaining that he'd like to see some new, innovative tool come along. But where Mark Taylor left off with Auto-Tune, many other have since stepped in.
By the late '90s and early '00s, Auto-Tune had become prevalent in most recording studios, but engineers were mostly using it for its intended purpose of subtly correcting a vocal performance. A few people had figured out how to recreate the “Cher effect.” Rodney Jerkins, the prominent R&B and pop producer behind acts like Brandy, Destiny's Child, and more recently, Justin Bieber, dropped it into a remix of Jennifer Lopez's “If You Had My Love” in 1999. Elsewhere, the sound began to infiltrate Jamaican dancehall around 2001, on songs like Tanto Metro and Devonte's “Give It To Her."
As a teenager and amateur producer living in Tallahassee,
Florida, T-Pain heard the effect on the Darkchild remix of “If You Had My Love” and instantly felt compelled to recreate it. Growing up exposed to funk acts like Zapp & Roger, Pain had always had an appreciation for the distorted vocals those artists created with talk boxes and vocoders. He identified with that sound more than he did with “gangster rap,” and, as he began creating his own music, he wanted something that would stand out from hip-hop's harder-edged sounds. The J. Lo effect was just what he needed, although he had no idea what it was.
“I actually went to a bunch of hackers and a shytload of computer things like 'Guys, please tell me that this thing exists and Jennifer Lopez is not the only person with it,'” remembers T-Pain. He says he spent around two years combing through CDs loaded with bootleg software and trying different plug-ins searching for the right effect. Ones labeled “vocoder”seemed promising but led him nowhere, while Auto-Tune didn't seem like it could do what he wanted either. “I literally went through every plug-in and every preset on the plug-in,” he recalls with a laugh.
When he finally did figure out the zero setting, T-Pain was ecstatic, running through the house in excitement. Like Taylor, he also kept his technique a secret. For the next few years, as he shared his music around town, he pretended to have his own spin on talk-box technology that didn't require singing with a tube in his mouth. “I wouldn't tell anybody what it was,” he admits. "I tried to keep it to myself." But once his records started blowing up, his secret became harder to hide.
After landing a record deal with Akon's Konvict Muzik label in 2004, he released his debut single, “I'm Sprung,” in 2005. “I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)” came shortly after. Both landed in
Billboard's Top 10, the latter in particular becoming a viral success that marked T-Pain as a stylistic innovator. Nonetheless, the narrative surrounding T-Pain at the time seemed to focus mostly on his attempts to disguise himself as a "real" vocalist—the title of his debut album,
Rappa Ternt Sanga, played into the notion. While people enjoyed his vocal effects, they didn't necessarily know what to make of them, assuming it was some sort of vocoder trickery and wondering when he'd get bored of the gimmick.
Listeners' stances were more clear-cut by 2007 when T-Pain released his sophomore effort,
Epiphany, which arrived just as concerns about “ringtone rap” were peaking. With his omnipresent No. 1 single “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')” and his tinny, robotic vocals, T-Pain was the perfect scapegoat for the onset of an audio phenomenon. His constant reliance on Auto-Tune—although the fact that it was not a vocoder was still essentially a trade secret that critics and others failed to identify correctly—prompted suggestions that he lacked talent or that his music was one-dimensional. A backlash was building, but as T-Pain kept churning out chart-topping singles, the whole music industry started paying attention.
By this point, Auto-Tune had been around for a decade, and it was a familiar tool for most producers and studio engineers. Seth Firkins first used Auto-Tune when he was coming up in Louisville with the late songwriter Static Major, who would occasionally use the plug-in when laying down reference vocals for other singers, adjusting a few notes here and there. Static would appear on Lil Wayne's Auto-Tuned smash hit “Lollipop." Firkins took that approach with him when he began working with Atlanta rapper/producer/songwriter Shawty Redd in 2007. Although Redd wasn't a very strong singer, he was not afraid to write for the different artists he worked with. Firkins would often throw on Auto-Tune turned all the way to one or zero while Redd recorded and “let him go to town.”
At first it was just a “cheat code” to make writing easier, but gradually Redd learned how to manipulate the plug-in and enjoyed using in its own way. He cut a song called “Drifter,” which his label liked but didn't push. However, Atlanta's DJ Funky played it for Snoop Dogg, who loved it and wanted to record it himself. Redd and Firkins instead made “Sexual Eruption” (renamed “Sensual Seduction”) which reached No. 7 on the
Billboard Hot 100 and, sent a message that Auto-Tune wasn't just T-Pain's thing. Firkins called it “a watershed moment for Auto-Tune,” explaining that suddenly everyone finally felt like they could use it without being considered a biter “because Uncle Snoop did it.” (Ironically, “Drifter” would be released months later to criticisms that it was a copy of “Sexual Eruption.”)
T-Pain remembered thinking Snoop's song was “fukking awesome” and feeling validated by its success. But he also realized that Snoop's endorsement would become a double-edged sword. Previously there had been a sort of understanding that artists who wanted the T-Pain effect would come to T-Pain to appear on their song. Now people were asking producers and engineers for the effect on their own vocals.
Among the most enthusiastic adopters was Lil Wayne. He released a string of warbling Auto-Tune experiments like
“Prostitute Flange” that pushed the effect toward weirder, more alien extremes. Instead of borrowing T-Pain's commercial gloss, Wayne took an uglier approach to Auto-Tune, which lent itself to a certain type of emotional vulnerability. Used this way, the plug-in almost became a new instrument (in part, Firkins noted, because he often mangled the sound of Auto-Tune by not setting the plug-in the same key as the beat.) Professor Mark Anthony Neal compared the unique effect of Wayne's vocals to John Coltrane's avant-garde saxophone solos and called Wayne's music the “first edge of the Post-Katrina Blues.”
Not that everything Lil Wayne did with Auto-Tune was totally weird: He scored his biggest-ever hit with “Lollipop,” which used Auto-Tune, and a collaboration album with T-Pain was promised. But as Wayne's mixtapes were increasingly littered with Auto-Tune experiments, the tool became an invitation to try weird stuff that had once been outside his comfort zone.
The growing sense that Auto-Tune could unlock a new kind of emotional expression was definitely helped by Kanye West, who emerged after grieving his mother's untimely death with a heavily Auto-Tuned verse on
Young Jeezy's single “Put On.” It was another breakthrough moment for Auto-Tune as a tool that connoted chilling, robotic alienation, and it remains one of Kanye's absolute best verses. That fall, Kanye began promoting a new album,
n a 2008 interview. "That’s why I made this album. If I gave a fukk, I wouldn’t use Auto-Tune. I’m using Auto-Tune because I don’t give a fukk. I like the way it sounds.”
i forgot DRUGS and MURDERS...
