Wild Pitch
Joe Gillis
Source: Globe & Mail
Delivering perfect pitch
With pressure on the likes of Britney Spears and Shania Twain to hit all
their notes accurately, singers are piping their voices through hardware
that corrects their vocal flaws during concerts
By SHOWWEI CHU
UPDATED AT 9:04 AM EDT Monday, Aug. 25, 2003
It's the latest controversy to hit pop music, and it doesn't have
anything to do with sex or drugs or trashed hotel rooms. Instead, the
music industry is divided over the use of computer hardware called
autotuners, used by acts such as Britney Spears and 'N Sync to make
sweeter music on the days when they can't quite hit those tricky notes.
Pop stars and punk bands alike are piping their voices through the
hardware, which corrects and improves their vocal pitch during concerts
and on records.
"It's actually been used on stage for quite a while," said Marco Alpert,
vice-president of marketing at Antares Audio Technologies, a major
supplier of autotuners.
With musicians on the road touring for weeks on end, the autotuner has
become a safety net that catches the occasional clinker on days when
their voices may be off. (In a nutshell, the autotuner is told what key
the vocal is in and analyzes the wave form in real time. If the singer
is off-key, it will adjust the pitch to the closest note in that key.)
Reba MacIntyre and Cher are unabashed about travelling with a rack of
autotuners, Alpert said. Other performers, such as Shania Twain, are
rumoured to use the electronic coach. But there is an unwillingness to
trumpet this fact because of the presumption that it's somehow cheating.
But they are being used because Antares alone has sold "thousands and
thousands" of them.
However, to some people in the industry, these devices are the work of
the devil. "It's satanic," said producer R. S. Field, who has used it
sparingly on records. "Digital vocal tuning is contributing to the Milli
Vanilli-fication of pop music. It's a shame that people just do it by
rote." Field produced Allison Moorer's Miss Fortune CD, which comes with
a label warning fans, "Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch correction
was used in the making of this album."
Gord Adams, a Toronto music engineer, set up the sound system at last
summer's Harley-Davidson 100th Anniversary Open Road Tour, which
featured artists such as Journey and April Wine. He witnessed autotuners
being employed there by about half the major recording artists.
"If I'm a professional singer, I don't want to say, 'Hey, nice to see
ya. I've got this thing on my sound board that makes my voice sound a
little more accurate,' " Adams said.
Alex Andronache manages a roster of record producers for management
agency Worlds End Canada.
He said he first noticed the use of autotuners a few years ago when he
took his daughter to see Britney Spears in Toronto.
He couldn't help but notice three Antares tuners lined up in a row at
the engineer's sound board that evening. But he said he couldn't say for
certain they were there for her vocals. They could also be used to tune
backup singers or their instruments.
The driving force behind this trend has been the fans themselves, who
now have a more educated ear and can tell if something is off-key,
industry experts said.
To attract concert-goers, artists will do whatever it takes sometimes to
please demanding customers, who often pay upwards of $100 a ticket to
hear their favourite musicians.
The presumption that autotuning is somehow cheating is just that,
proponents argue, since the technology won't transform a bad singer into
a good one.
"If you're a bad singer and sing out of tune, it'll turn you into a bad
singer who's now singing in tune," Antares's Alpert said.
Until recently, autotuners or pitch-correction tools have been mostly
used in the recording studio. Most albums nowadays are made using the
autotuner, which is also found in computer-based recording systems to
fix flat notes and off-key vocals or to create an entire performance by
digitally cutting and pasting numerous takes. Its ubiquitous presence
has courted criticism sometimes from the very people who use the
technology.
"I think it's abused," said Daryn Barry, who has mixed or engineered
music for Blue Rodeo and the Weakerthans and has used the autotuner in
an album he is producing with Toronto singer-songwriter Lindy. "But I
think like any tool that's fairly new that people will hopefully get
sick of [it]."
Barry said he relies on the autotuner when a musician's performance is
nearly flawless except for that one flat note "that's going to drive
everyone crazy" or when there are time constraints. In the old days, it
would take months to make a record.
Producer Brenndan McGuire, who produced and engineered several Sloan
albums, also avoids them as much as he can.
"As a producer, you like to coach a performance, and I think it's a lazy
way of achieving results through electronic means," he said.
But, like many, he is not opposed to using autotuners. In fact, McGuire,
who produced Sam Roberts's We Were Born in a Flame, said there was the
odd note in that album that "may have been stretched out with that
device."
Electronic tuning took off in the mid-1990s after the introduction of
computer-based recording systems, such as Digidesign's Pro Tools,
Emagic's Logic Platinum and Steinberg's Cubase. Their owners allowed
others to develop additional features on their flagship systems, one of
which is the autotuner.
But it's important to remember that sounding flat or sharp is as much a
musical expression as being in tune, industry experts said. The Doors'
Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan rarely sang in pitch, but they're still music
icons. The same goes for Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters and Billie Holiday.
Would fans still like them if the producers had decided that a curlicue
or buried roll or slightly out-of-tune phrasing was flawed and ran it
through a vocal tuner, Field wondered. Still, the newer punk bands, such
as Sum 41 and Good Charlottes, would sound awful if they weren't
corrected with an autotuner. Last week, Field was back in the studio,
producing another album with Moorer, and they were sticking to vintage
analog gear to record what they want, "a fat, aggressive sound."
Only this time, they've decided not to label the new CD with a warning.
"We can't put a sticker that says no computers were used in the making
of this record," he said. "It'd really make us look like jerks, but
there's not going to be any of that."
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"I don't mind lying, but I HATE inaccuracy." -- Samuel Butler