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Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching wi

Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track? As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track. This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen. Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.
l33tbro 5y ago
They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals. While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rogerclark 5y ago
  Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. There's nothing really subtle about it. EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
  - l33tbro 5y ago
    'One More Time' was antares also. I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.
  - omnicognate 5y ago
    > Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I'll say this. If you're in the middle of this culture you might not see it clearly. I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know. Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance. One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.) He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap. Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll." Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
captainbeardo 5y ago
Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.
- function_seven 5y ago
  When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly. Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit. Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
  - rogerclark 5y ago
    The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s. "Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
omnicognate 5y ago
Pointing out that there is greater complexity than merely Antares Autotune doesn't change the point at all. If music is snapped to 12-tone equal temperament it loses something for some listeners. You don't need to know the technical details (and I do know at least some of them, having developed vocal pitch detection algorithms) to have an aesthetic response to that. That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
cookie_monsta 5y ago
I think most laypeople's definition of autotune would be "that thing in every T-Pain song" or maybe "that thing that Cher did"[1] It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking. [1] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw
allturtles 5y ago
I'm assuming GP does not mean not any kind of attempt to produce nice sounding vocals. The are referring vocal tracks that don't really sound like human voices anymore, but like robot/android voices. I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category: - Heat Waves, Glass Animals - Need to Know, Doja Cat - Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  That's because trap music (the hip-hop genre) and EDM (which has a trap subgenre) were highly influential genres in the 2010s and their influence continues to be felt, even though the latter's heyday with its huge electronic music festivals has passed. Those genres quite often intentionally used robotic vocals as an artistic choice. Simultaneously, there's been a revival of synthwave and other '80s electronic music in terms of influence and style. "Stay" somewhat typifies the latter.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      By robot voices I’m referring to the highly digital effects-sounding vocals in the three top singles that were mentioned.
- sheepybloke 5y ago
  It's interesting to me that you called out Glass Animals. To me, they are exactly the type of music that's innovative, using interesting beats, vocals, and melodies.
yobbo 5y ago
Even ABBA had multiple vocal tracks mixed together, with subtle phase/pitch effects done with tape, to achieve richer/fuller/sparkling sound. Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
screye 5y ago
My sense is that most people mean pitch correction and samples that are perfectly snapped to even intervals. To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables. It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough. > People actually want this. I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions. Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections. All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week. ___________ I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today. I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by_year_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by... But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock). Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget. _________________ It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface. Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music. And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
bmitc 5y ago
It's interesting that you mentioned Max Martin. I immediately thought of the new Adele single Easy on Me as a counterexample to people wanting 150-200 production tracks on a single song like you'll find on Max Martin songs. What's interesting is that Max Martin worked on the album 30 but is not listed as a producer on that song, and I think it shows. It's stripped down and you can hear the rawness, squeaks, and rasp of Adele's voice. Contrast that with something like a Max Martin produced Ariana Grande song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c) or Katy Perry, both who can sing extremely well on their own, and there's a stark difference in production taste. Something like Rihanna's (ft. Kanye West and Paul McCartney) FourFiveSeconds would be impossible for Max Martin to produce (yes it has vocal and instrumental processing and tuning on it but it is very stripped down). Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given. It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song. https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy-perrys-firework https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...

Apocryphon 5y ago

Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.

l33tbro 5y ago

They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals. While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rogerclark 5y ago
Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. There's nothing really subtle about it. EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
- l33tbro 5y ago
  'One More Time' was antares also. I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  > Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  I'll say this. If you're in the middle of this culture you might not see it clearly. I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know. Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance. One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.) He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap. Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll." Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.

captainbeardo 5y ago

Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.

function_seven 5y ago
When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly. Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit. Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
- rogerclark 5y ago
  The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s. "Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.

omnicognate 5y ago

Pointing out that there is greater complexity than merely Antares Autotune doesn't change the point at all. If music is snapped to 12-tone equal temperament it loses something for some listeners. You don't need to know the technical details (and I do know at least some of them, having developed vocal pitch detection algorithms) to have an aesthetic response to that. That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.

cookie_monsta 5y ago

I think most laypeople's definition of autotune would be "that thing in every T-Pain song" or maybe "that thing that Cher did"[1] It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking. [1] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw

allturtles 5y ago

I'm assuming GP does not mean not any kind of attempt to produce nice sounding vocals. The are referring vocal tracks that don't really sound like human voices anymore, but like robot/android voices. I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category: - Heat Waves, Glass Animals - Need to Know, Doja Cat - Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.

Apocryphon 5y ago
That's because trap music (the hip-hop genre) and EDM (which has a trap subgenre) were highly influential genres in the 2010s and their influence continues to be felt, even though the latter's heyday with its huge electronic music festivals has passed. Those genres quite often intentionally used robotic vocals as an artistic choice. Simultaneously, there's been a revival of synthwave and other '80s electronic music in terms of influence and style. "Stay" somewhat typifies the latter.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    By robot voices I’m referring to the highly digital effects-sounding vocals in the three top singles that were mentioned.
sheepybloke 5y ago
It's interesting to me that you called out Glass Animals. To me, they are exactly the type of music that's innovative, using interesting beats, vocals, and melodies.

yobbo 5y ago

Even ABBA had multiple vocal tracks mixed together, with subtle phase/pitch effects done with tape, to achieve richer/fuller/sparkling sound. Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.

screye 5y ago

My sense is that most people mean pitch correction and samples that are perfectly snapped to even intervals. To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables. It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough. > People actually want this. I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions. Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections. All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week. ___________ I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today. I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by_year_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by... But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock). Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget. _________________ It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface. Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music. And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)

bmitc 5y ago

It's interesting that you mentioned Max Martin. I immediately thought of the new Adele single Easy on Me as a counterexample to people wanting 150-200 production tracks on a single song like you'll find on Max Martin songs. What's interesting is that Max Martin worked on the album 30 but is not listed as a producer on that song, and I think it shows. It's stripped down and you can hear the rawness, squeaks, and rasp of Adele's voice. Contrast that with something like a Max Martin produced Ariana Grande song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c) or Katy Perry, both who can sing extremely well on their own, and there's a stark difference in production taste. Something like Rihanna's (ft. Kanye West and Paul McCartney) FourFiveSeconds would be impossible for Max Martin to produce (yes it has vocal and instrumental processing and tuning on it but it is very stripped down). Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given. It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song. https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy-perrys-firework https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...