Tracy Lawrence - Autotuned?
Dave Lawrence
mainly for you Nashville types, assuming there's still some of you out
there.
I've been listening to Tracy Lawrence's new album, Strong, and seem to hear
the pretty obvious use of autotune on his voice. And I don't think that I'm
talking about the intentional Cher effect.
Is this common practice in the genre? Not being a Country afficionado I
wouldn't be aware of what the current trends are. i was just surprised to
hear it in the work of some who I understand has quite a career behind him.
Any thoughts?
Dave Lawrence
www.soundclick.com/davelawrence
snabbu
If it is used properly you are not supposed to be able to detect it.
I have had a bit of a play with it and I could not hear an obvious
effect. Other than that the vocalists voice was improved.
I made three passes and corrected a couple of bad things manually
referenced back to a midi track. It's quite a bit of fiddling around
much easier to sing in tune.
What I did was
(1) made a copy of the original vocal track to refer back to and in case
I stuffed it up.
(2) Processed to remove the vibrato completely.
(3) Processed to correct to the midi scale. But leaving in a reasonable
tolerance. And excluding any notes that were more than a quarter of a
semitone off key.
(4) Manually corrected the really off notes.
(5) Ran one more pass with slightly tighter perameters.
(6) Added back the vibrato to match the original track.
The end result sounded natural. I suppose if you tried to do it all in
one pass that it would end up sounding squashed as you would have to
crank up the settings for the really off notes and the presence of
vibrato obviously effects tuning and tuning correction so that would get
hammered as well, and come out machine like.
Cheers
Gary
--
--semper sume remedium casum--
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/garyyeomans.htm
http://www.mp3.com.au/artist.asp?id=11367
http://members.optusnet.com.au/snabbu/home.html
Irene Jackson
lived in Nashville and told me that he was giving tours of the studio he
worked in once, lots of big names came through, some of them sat in one room
and jammed. He said that's how you could tell which ones needed autotune
:-)
--
IJ
http://www.irenejackson.com
http://www.irenejackson.com/tips.html
"Dave Lawrence" <da...@shanti-deletethesewords-man.com> wrote in message
news:c794eh$31r$1...@hercules.btinternet.com...
Lawrence Bullock
Lawrence
Jonny Durango
used it in that song "do you believe in life after love?" to add a cool,
computerized. robotic quality to her voice. More info:
http://www.computersandmusic.com/xcgi/SoftCart.exe/store1/antares/autotune.h
tml?E+mystore1
--
Jonny Durango
http://www.soundclick.com/ratcitymusic.htm
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag
the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have
to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for
lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall, at the Nuremberg trials after
WWII.
"Lawrence Bullock" <lbul...@mcn.org> wrote in message
news:c79ed...@enews2.newsguy.com...
Kenn Crawford
> I've been listening to Tracy Lawrence's new album, Strong, and seem to
hear
> the pretty obvious use of autotune on his voice.
Hi everyone,
If it was that obvious then the engineer/producer should be shot on sight :)
From my understanding, autotune is suppose to correct minor (very minor)
variances in pitch....anything more than that and it would be easier to just
re-sing it and punch-in punch-out the correct notes.
> Is this common practice in the genre? Not being a Country afficionado I
> wouldn't be aware of what the current trends are. i was just surprised to
> hear it in the work of some who I understand has quite a career behind
him.
A while back I heard a live radio broadcast of Gary Allen. My sister is a
huge fan of his and the first thing she said was:
"Who is he suppose to be, Gary Allen? Sounds like karaoke and he sounds
like sh#t". Little did she know it was him, only without his producer,
engineer, multiple takes and studio "tricks" to make him sound better. On
stage he's just Gary Allen....some nights he's on, some nights he may be
off, but there are no retakes when you are live :)
Genre doesn't matter, some artists sing great in and out of the studio;
others need "help" when recording because they feed off their audience -
take the audience out of the equation and they can't perform as well.
Others perform better in a studio then live.
> Any thoughts?
>
If the groove is hot, the vocals are hot, and the take is otherwise great
except for one or two minor glitches, why wouldn't you want to fix it with
an autotune? You may never capture that performance again.
If it's ok for a guitarist to play with a capo, and a drummer to play with a
click track, why should an otherwise good vocal track be scrapped because of
one or two glitches? If it makes the song better, use it. If it is as
obvious as you described on Tracy's CD, he should learn to sing the damn
songs....speaking of which, I have to go find that CD now, curiosity is
setting in :)
-Kenn
OSSONGS
>From: "Kenn Crawford" kenn_c...@hotmail.com
>Date: 5/5/2004 11:39 PM Pacific Standard Time
>Message-id: <S4lmc.35705$Np3.1...@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>
I agree.
Artists have the off night too when they can be well off a note here and there.
>If it's ok for a guitarist to play with a capo, and a drummer to play with a
>click track, why should an otherwise good vocal track be scrapped because of
>one or two glitches? >
SO right.
Dolores
Cl.Massé
message de news:c794eh$31r$1...@hercules.btinternet.com...
> I've been listening to Tracy Lawrence's new album, Strong, and seem to
> hear the pretty obvious use of autotune on his voice. And I don't
> think that I'm talking about the intentional Cher effect.
It isn't autotune, but vocoder, well, that's what they claim. Yet, I
seem the entire track _Believe_ is autotuned, and the "intentional Cher
effect" has the purpose to conceal that through contrast.
--
~~~~ clmasse at free dot fr
http://jude.iuma.com/
Songster
> It isn't autotune, but vocoder, well, that's what they claim. Yet, I
> seem the entire track _Believe_ is autotuned, and the "intentional Cher
> effect" has the purpose to conceal that through contrast.
Actually, the Cher song effect is done with Antares Autotune. The
vocoder will make the robotic sound but not rapid-fire note step-ups
and step-downs like auto-tune does.
As far as autotune in Nashville, all the majors use it on practically
every release. It's an acceptable production technique when used
transparently. Most of the time a singer's pitch is off
ever-so-slightly that most listeners would never even notice it... but
other artists and producers would hear it so it gets autotuned lightly
just to bring it within specs.
If used too much, yeah it can make a bad performance sound worse. Or a
good performance seem pale or lifeless.
And to make the topic more interesting, an artist who may not want to
have a bad day on stage can take his little black box with him and
patch the AT1 into the soundboard so that his off notes get
automatically corrected electronically before the sound reaches the
audience. Not many do that, but a few.
Then there are the Nashville autotune magicians... these guys can take
a mediocre vocal track and turn it into pure gold. Pro Tools, the
Antares Autotune Plugin and a Mac in the right hands can and often do
produce huge dividends for the artist. They make 'em sound
goooooooood.
Then there is the Tracy Lawrence Album you are referring to.... sounds
like bad magic to me. Not all that is done should be done and not all
that gets done gets done right.
There ya go.
Cl.Massé
news:51d85458.04050...@posting.google.com...
> As far as autotune in Nashville, all the majors use it on practically
> every release. It's an acceptable production technique when used
> transparently. Most of the time a singer's pitch is off
> ever-so-slightly that most listeners would never even notice it... but
> other artists and producers would hear it so it gets autotuned lightly
> just to bring it within specs.
It's sad because a vocal exactely in tune is cold, lifeless, and
impersonal. Besides slightly off notes, there is also little effects
like glissando, modulation, attack, and the ubiquitous vibrato that are
helpful for the purpose of expression. Changing the vibrato for
autotune in order to hide imperfect pitches is like changing plague for
cholera. One may wonder why they still use human performers.
Songster
Well, it's really not as horrific as it may at first seem. Today's
autotune software is fast enough to preserve all the expressive
gestures and still accurately adjust the overall pitch center to be in
tune. The speed at which the input pitch is slewed to the target pitch
can be adjusted to the style of performance.
So, expressive gestures like scoops, bends and vibrato are still
retained but flat or sharp notes or endings can be improved. You can
set it to correct as many or as few notes as you'd like to keep the
performance authentic. It's just post processing, part of the package
available for most recording takes.
Lawrence Bullock
"Songster" <never-...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:51d85458.04050...@posting.google.com...
Especially when studio time is expensive and you can't get the artist back
in to fix a bum note or two.
slideroc...@gmail.com
Michael