Everyone is familiar with the Will Ferrell skit on SNL and the classic one liner taken from a farce of Blue Oyster Cult in the recording studio. “Needs more cowbell.” One need only utter those 3 words and watch everyone in the room attempt to recreate their own personal rendition of the line. Which is funny in of itself since I am willing to wager most people are only vaguely with the song and even less so with the band. (No one is more guilty of this than I since, I was born several years following the release.) But it has become such a pop cliche and oh so indelibly engrained in our social psyche that it is a universal truth.

This brings me to auto-tune. Everyone knows what it is. I suppose it would be more correct to say, everyone is familiar with its brand identity. The common conception is that vocals come in, out comes a perfectly in-tune vocalist. It is not a new concept. Before auto-tune there were a host of other tools that could be used to mask out-of-tune vocals. Reverb, chorusing, distortion, filtering, all have had a place in this endeavor but auto-tune has emerged over the years as the savior of pop music. It has become something like a household commodity, as Kleenex is to tissues. You can’t dabble in pop-music production without throwing some auto-tune into the mix. It’s not just the R& B artists that everyone loves to hate on VH1. Emo, Buzz-rock(94.5 the Buzz being the alternative station in houston), Rap, Country, and I wouldn’t doubt if Heavy Metal didn’t auto-tune its screamers. But the question that is wanting, is why?

The funny thing about auto-tune, is that a classically trained singer, who is taught to use vibrato to hold a notes at the end of a phrase will find themselves jumping all over the placer as it falls above and below the threshold of out-of tuneness. Now I suppose a classically trained singer would probably sing well enough that auto-tune wouldn’t be necessary. However, it does seem ironic that when auto-tune is being used, it is better to sing consistently out of tune and give a flat performance, than it is to give a good performance and sing maybe one or two notes which are somewhat flat.

Of course with the advent of digital mixing tools, any bit of this auto-tune can be completely automated to fit to the song. But who really wants to do that. There comes a point where all that time and effort spent creating an artificial sound, you might as well be generating sine waves or creating a midi patch to sound like a vocal line. Did no one ever think to maybe let the singer try the line again.  Naah, it would be much easier to hurriedly move the session on because nobody wants confrontation if you can fix it in mixing or post.

You either really love it, or you hate it, or maybe you simply don’t hear it. Me personally, I find it grating on the ears. It reminds me of a sound I heard in the Apple IIe classic “Robotron.” (the sound that starts as each level opens up. I digress…) Whenever I hear it on the radio, I don’t think “wow that singer is perfectly in tune.” I think it reflects in many ways a certain bad attitude towards music in general. Don’t get me wrong, there are very few people who are able to have such control of their voice that every performance is a perfect take. I just don’t think it’s necessary. It takes away from the natural body of the voice each singer possesses, putting everyone into the same sort of mold, and not a very good one at that. It certainly shouldn’t take the place of a good program of voice and ear training. But like the Will Ferell skit, it has become almost a comedic farce of itself, so much, that they just gave up trying to conceal it nowadays.  (as naturally it takes considerable work to get auto-tune not to sound like T-Pain or Lil’ Wayne). It’s a lot like when stereo first came out. Everyone thought it was pretty cool when you had a vocal move from the left to right speakers real fast, not for any particular reason other than that they could. So I always wonder if auto-tune was available back in the day, would people be digging Dylan if he sounded like an incoherent robot? Would we be auto-tuning Tom Petty? Hrmm…Needs more autotune!