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That's an interesting defence of autotune, but I don't think it's relevant to my comment, which clearly talks about my own personal preference. I don't want to

That's an interesting defence of autotune, but I don't think it's relevant to my comment, which clearly talks about my own personal preference. I don't want to listen to artists who use autotune. I _do_ want to listen to artists who don't. I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal. What I am saying is that I would like to be able to consciously choose to only listen to and support those musicians, and I will gladly pay a disproportionate amount for it. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I am not the only one who feels this way. Also btw - > when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from.

Orcastrap 4y ago
imagine thinking you can actually notice light autotune (let alone melodyne!) use in a recording
- boomskats 4y ago
  You also just _completely_ missed my point. I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use autotune. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use autotune. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice.
  - Orcastrap 4y ago
    my point is that you're depriving yourself of good art for an arbitrary moralism. just as ridiculous as saying "i'll never listen to a singer that uses compression bc the artists i listen to MUST have perfect dynamics (even though this has zero impact on the final product)" im making fun of you for being silly
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      He says 'I' meaning he's choosing for himself for his own reason, he's not forcing it on others. You might at least respect that even if you, and I, don't share the reasoning.
    - boomskats 4y ago
      I never said I don't listen to it. I said I want the option of explicitly filtering it out sometimes. The two are entirely different.
  - moth-fuzz 4y ago
    "I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use EQ. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use EQ. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice." Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. Regardless, whether or not a singer or producer uses a particular effect on their voice does not distinguish between the vocals being 'real' or not. If you simply don't like the way it sounds, on the level of artistic taste, well, you can make that judgement for yourself, but, to claim it's more profound than that is just pure pretense. Also, why are we talking about autotuned vocals on a thread about a speech synthesizer? Claims of 'real vocals' are already out the window at that point.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. If they don't make such choices for themselves, they're not much of an artist, more like mass-produced manufactured candy pop/r&b/etc...
      - Orcastrap 4y ago
        "if you're leaving artistic choices in the hands of someone else and aren't building your computer, DAW, and semi-conductors from scratch, all on your own, you're not much of an artist"
        coldtea 4y ago
        This is some novel kind of cross between a strawman and a slippery slope fallacy, so full of bad faith that it isn't really worth an answer... Because of course there can't be a cutoff point, with my argument applying to the level of involvement I described (if one's vocals are to be processed with autotune or some major effect is a major thing for a vocalist to leave to others, even level of reverb or echo will often be a thing to debate with the producer/engineers) and not to ridiculous meta-levels like building your own DAW.
  - eropple 4y ago
    I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". Perhaps there is also a standard mic for Vocal Realness. I assume it must be a SM58; it is, after all, well-known that having a low-pass switch on the microphone lowers the industry-calibrated Realness Score by at least 250 mSpr(ingsteen). More if it's on. edit: A friend also pointed out to me the inherent Springsteen ceiling of computer-reproduced audio. And you know, he's right, I'm going to go find a chamber and hire some monks for the true realness that only an authentic Gregorian chant can provide. Denon sells them in twelve-packs, you know.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". It's not based on some technical argument or law of physics. People either get why, or they don't. If you want some kind of technical justification, those effects you mentioned just add some sparkle (flanger) or fixes the balance (often just to make a recording, which begins deader in a sound-treated studio, sound closer to real life environment (reverb) and dynamics (compression). Autotune, on the other hand, changes the pitch and vibrato, you know two of the main things a singer is supposed to produce. And if overdone as "effect", it also fucks the timbre. And let's be real, nobody says this about some singer using autotune to fix a flat note or two. It's the autotune-as-effect (whether T-pain levels or more subtle) that people complain about.
      - eropple 4y ago
        I think you may have missed what I'm getting at here. I very much "get" why people don't like it, and most of the music I listen to regularly goes light on autotune/melodyne. And I am not saying that one has to like those vocals at all. But the idea that they're not "real vocals" is an attempt at shitty gatekeeping that has no place in music. This wannabe arbiter does not get to decide what "real" is or what "art" is. It's gatekeeping bullshit.
- WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
  Imagine thinking there aren't people with exceptional hearing that notice all sorts of things the average person doesn't.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    It's sort of like thinking statistical outliers are relevant to a general argument.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Nadya 4y ago
    Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in. There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.
    - WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
      > Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me Perhaps so. I'm not one of those people that picks up on (or claims to) these subtleties, so I wouldn't know. I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
    - boomskats 4y ago
      > people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in You're obviously entitled to share your opinion, but also I also find your strawman a little offensive. Vocal pitch correction is a very real and very noticeable category of processing, absolutely not the same realm of snake oil bullshit as $30,000 gold plated wires. If it was, it just wouldn't exist. Why would anyone ever take the time to write software that correct vocal tuning if it made zero perceivable difference to the output? > There are absolutely edits so subtle [...] Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. Nobody ever 'corrects someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step'. It just doesn't happen, human voice can't consistently hold a frequency to that resolution for more than a few milliseconds. For reference, a 1/4 step vocal oscillation is only considered 'moderate vibrato' [0]. Even a 1/128th pitch variation is rarely considered noticeable or consistent enough to correct. This is miles away from a '1/1400th' (which is also a very strange fraction to choose btw, even when you take harmonics into account). I posted this in another comment, but you should take a couple of minutes and take the MusicLab Tone Deafness test [1]. It'll give you an idea of what 1/64th variance sounds like, and how noticeable it is or isn't to your ears. [0] https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html [1] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td
- boomskats 4y ago
  Who thinks that? I certainly don't and never said I did. Nevertheless there is no 'light autotune' filter on any of the major streaming services either. There's a pretty interesting test[0] on themusiclab.org, that will test how good your microtonal perception is. See how you score - it might align with how well you're able to perceive autotune. Here's my score [1]. This was from my first attempt a few months ago, but I've done it a couple more times since and my score is pretty consistent - whether I like it or not. [0] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td [1] https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z
varispeed 4y ago
It may not exactly be about artist. For instance person mixing the artist's song (putting together all the individual instrument and vocal tracks and ensuring it sounds good together) may use autotune without artist even knowing. Then you have problem of the budget. Studio time is quite expensive and after nth take hard decisions have to be made. Booking another session or fix the tuning with software? Also take into account that vocals that you hear in songs, that are not obviously autotuned may actually be composed of dozens of takes. That technique is called comping and the mixer (sometimes together with the artist) would choose the best take out of dozen often for each phrase or even single word. Sort of like natural autotune, when e.g. only phrases that sound in tune are picked.
tshaddox 4y ago
> I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal. Any examples? Are they all fairly small artists, or are there some big names who explicitly don't use it?
- coldtea 4y ago
  Is Bob Dylan a big name? Tom Waits? Coldplay? And if those are "old", one can still find tons of modern (20-something) musicians which don't use it, but still have a sizable following. Not sure what you have in mind, but people don't need to listen to the top-20 or BS R&B. Even if you want to listen to electronic music, there's a big universe of artists who have nothing to do with the "autotune" sound and modern commercial productions.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    > Is Bob Dylan a big name? Tom Waits? Coldplay? Tom Waits and Coldplay (or specifically, their mixing engineers) have gone on the record saying they use Melodyne in their marketing brochures. Again, it is literally impossible for a human to know if pitch correction was used on a song. But if it's a song that was released after 2010 and mixed by an engineer, they used pitch correction, guaranteed. [0] https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Tom Waits and Coldplay (or specifically, their mixing engineers) have gone on the record saying they use Melodyne in their marketing brochures. Not exactly. A guy who worked with them said it. They also have worked with dozens of others which would be where they used it. Also Waits recorded for 25+ years before Autotune (much less Melodyne) was even a thing.
      - com2kid 4y ago
alexb_ 4y ago
>I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal I think you are forgetting that the autotune IS their creative intent. T-Pain is probably the most famous heavy autotune user of all time, despite having an amazing voice without it. It's an intentional effect - like how electric guitars aren't "worse" because you aren't hearing the raw sound of the string.
- boomskats 4y ago
  I know T-Pain is an incredible singer. I know artists use it as an intentional effect. I don't think I'm forgetting anything though, I'm not sure of what your argument is here.
klodolph 4y ago
> I don't want to listen to artists who use autotune. I _do_ want to listen to artists who don't. If you can’t tell the difference, why do you care? If you can tell the difference, why do you need the label? Speaking as an amateur musician, I think these arguments reflect a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision. I’ll say that a big part of the blame lies with poorly used autotune. Just to pick an example, the entire first season of Glee is especially bad, to the point where I want to leave the room. Then there’s various places where autotune has been overused on singers who don’t actually need it to begin with (Bublé comes to mind), or where autotune has been used to cover up some sloppy singing. (Bublé is particularly illustrative—it is known that he uses autotune, but he has said that he doesn’t… I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used. I suspect that many other singers are also unaware that they are being autotuned—but you can sometimes find clear evidence for it when you analyze their songs with a computer.) But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster. The amount of comping and autotune that you do is a matter of style and situation—producers are free to do comping and autotune as they see fit, to capture what they think is the best version of each part. It means that you can say, “take 3 has the most beautiful phrasing and a lot of soul to it, it’s just a little sharp” and then manually adjust the pitch by the amount you think is appropriate. > Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from. I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place, and I can’t reasonably be expected to remember the exact source for every piece of information, nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say.
- boomskats 4y ago
  > why do you need the label I don't want to get halfway through listening to a song to hit autotuned vox. I just don't, I'd like the option to filter on that. I would like a recommendation/discovery engine that eliminates that anxiety. > a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision Quite the opposite. I understand music production extensively. I studied it, I have used it, half my social circle are studio engineers or conservatoire grads. I just want the option of filtering on artists whose creative vision _is_ the original vocal recording. > I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used The only reason that man has a career is because his geriatric target audience is too old to know what autotune is (hence his denial is plausible). I'm pretty sure his record sales depend almost entirely on the abuse of autotune for the hard of hearing. He isn't an example I'd have used in this argument. > But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster I totally know and appreciate all of this. Recording without it is considerably more effort and money, it's often not economically viable. Nevertheless, I want to be able to sometimes filter on it. > I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place When your argument is your opinion or something drawn from your personal experience, that's fine. However your words were: "Fact is, people say this, but when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular". Stating a 'counterintuitive fact' the way you did suggests it was proven in a study or experiment of some kind. When putting arguments like that forward, most posters on HN tend to reference their sources. Otherwise your 'fact' is just an opinion. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not a 'fact'. If you state something is a fact, I think an expectation that you can back it up with an external reference is entirely reasonable. > nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say Not sure where I said that you were expected to shut up. If I implied it I apologise. However, I stand by my expectations of providing external references for things stated as fact.

Orcastrap 4y ago

imagine thinking you can actually notice light autotune (let alone melodyne!) use in a recording

boomskats 4y ago
You also just _completely_ missed my point. I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use autotune. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use autotune. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice.
- Orcastrap 4y ago
  my point is that you're depriving yourself of good art for an arbitrary moralism. just as ridiculous as saying "i'll never listen to a singer that uses compression bc the artists i listen to MUST have perfect dynamics (even though this has zero impact on the final product)" im making fun of you for being silly
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    He says 'I' meaning he's choosing for himself for his own reason, he's not forcing it on others. You might at least respect that even if you, and I, don't share the reasoning.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    I never said I don't listen to it. I said I want the option of explicitly filtering it out sometimes. The two are entirely different.
- moth-fuzz 4y ago
  "I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use EQ. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use EQ. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice." Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. Regardless, whether or not a singer or producer uses a particular effect on their voice does not distinguish between the vocals being 'real' or not. If you simply don't like the way it sounds, on the level of artistic taste, well, you can make that judgement for yourself, but, to claim it's more profound than that is just pure pretense. Also, why are we talking about autotuned vocals on a thread about a speech synthesizer? Claims of 'real vocals' are already out the window at that point.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. If they don't make such choices for themselves, they're not much of an artist, more like mass-produced manufactured candy pop/r&b/etc...
    - Orcastrap 4y ago
      "if you're leaving artistic choices in the hands of someone else and aren't building your computer, DAW, and semi-conductors from scratch, all on your own, you're not much of an artist"
      - coldtea 4y ago
        This is some novel kind of cross between a strawman and a slippery slope fallacy, so full of bad faith that it isn't really worth an answer... Because of course there can't be a cutoff point, with my argument applying to the level of involvement I described (if one's vocals are to be processed with autotune or some major effect is a major thing for a vocalist to leave to others, even level of reverb or echo will often be a thing to debate with the producer/engineers) and not to ridiculous meta-levels like building your own DAW.
- eropple 4y ago
  I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". Perhaps there is also a standard mic for Vocal Realness. I assume it must be a SM58; it is, after all, well-known that having a low-pass switch on the microphone lowers the industry-calibrated Realness Score by at least 250 mSpr(ingsteen). More if it's on. edit: A friend also pointed out to me the inherent Springsteen ceiling of computer-reproduced audio. And you know, he's right, I'm going to go find a chamber and hire some monks for the true realness that only an authentic Gregorian chant can provide. Denon sells them in twelve-packs, you know.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". It's not based on some technical argument or law of physics. People either get why, or they don't. If you want some kind of technical justification, those effects you mentioned just add some sparkle (flanger) or fixes the balance (often just to make a recording, which begins deader in a sound-treated studio, sound closer to real life environment (reverb) and dynamics (compression). Autotune, on the other hand, changes the pitch and vibrato, you know two of the main things a singer is supposed to produce. And if overdone as "effect", it also fucks the timbre. And let's be real, nobody says this about some singer using autotune to fix a flat note or two. It's the autotune-as-effect (whether T-pain levels or more subtle) that people complain about.
    - eropple 4y ago
      I think you may have missed what I'm getting at here. I very much "get" why people don't like it, and most of the music I listen to regularly goes light on autotune/melodyne. And I am not saying that one has to like those vocals at all. But the idea that they're not "real vocals" is an attempt at shitty gatekeeping that has no place in music. This wannabe arbiter does not get to decide what "real" is or what "art" is. It's gatekeeping bullshit.
WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
Imagine thinking there aren't people with exceptional hearing that notice all sorts of things the average person doesn't.
- coldtea 4y ago
  It's sort of like thinking statistical outliers are relevant to a general argument.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Nadya 4y ago
  Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in. There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.
  - WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
    > Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me Perhaps so. I'm not one of those people that picks up on (or claims to) these subtleties, so I wouldn't know. I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    > people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in You're obviously entitled to share your opinion, but also I also find your strawman a little offensive. Vocal pitch correction is a very real and very noticeable category of processing, absolutely not the same realm of snake oil bullshit as $30,000 gold plated wires. If it was, it just wouldn't exist. Why would anyone ever take the time to write software that correct vocal tuning if it made zero perceivable difference to the output? > There are absolutely edits so subtle [...] Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. Nobody ever 'corrects someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step'. It just doesn't happen, human voice can't consistently hold a frequency to that resolution for more than a few milliseconds. For reference, a 1/4 step vocal oscillation is only considered 'moderate vibrato' [0]. Even a 1/128th pitch variation is rarely considered noticeable or consistent enough to correct. This is miles away from a '1/1400th' (which is also a very strange fraction to choose btw, even when you take harmonics into account). I posted this in another comment, but you should take a couple of minutes and take the MusicLab Tone Deafness test [1]. It'll give you an idea of what 1/64th variance sounds like, and how noticeable it is or isn't to your ears. [0] https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html [1] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td
boomskats 4y ago
Who thinks that? I certainly don't and never said I did. Nevertheless there is no 'light autotune' filter on any of the major streaming services either. There's a pretty interesting test[0] on themusiclab.org, that will test how good your microtonal perception is. See how you score - it might align with how well you're able to perceive autotune. Here's my score [1]. This was from my first attempt a few months ago, but I've done it a couple more times since and my score is pretty consistent - whether I like it or not. [0] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td [1] https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z

varispeed 4y ago

It may not exactly be about artist. For instance person mixing the artist's song (putting together all the individual instrument and vocal tracks and ensuring it sounds good together) may use autotune without artist even knowing. Then you have problem of the budget. Studio time is quite expensive and after nth take hard decisions have to be made. Booking another session or fix the tuning with software? Also take into account that vocals that you hear in songs, that are not obviously autotuned may actually be composed of dozens of takes. That technique is called comping and the mixer (sometimes together with the artist) would choose the best take out of dozen often for each phrase or even single word. Sort of like natural autotune, when e.g. only phrases that sound in tune are picked.

tshaddox 4y ago

> I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal. Any examples? Are they all fairly small artists, or are there some big names who explicitly don't use it?

coldtea 4y ago
Is Bob Dylan a big name? Tom Waits? Coldplay? And if those are "old", one can still find tons of modern (20-something) musicians which don't use it, but still have a sizable following. Not sure what you have in mind, but people don't need to listen to the top-20 or BS R&B. Even if you want to listen to electronic music, there's a big universe of artists who have nothing to do with the "autotune" sound and modern commercial productions.
- mjr00 4y ago
  > Is Bob Dylan a big name? Tom Waits? Coldplay? Tom Waits and Coldplay (or specifically, their mixing engineers) have gone on the record saying they use Melodyne in their marketing brochures. Again, it is literally impossible for a human to know if pitch correction was used on a song. But if it's a song that was released after 2010 and mixed by an engineer, they used pitch correction, guaranteed. [0] https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Tom Waits and Coldplay (or specifically, their mixing engineers) have gone on the record saying they use Melodyne in their marketing brochures. Not exactly. A guy who worked with them said it. They also have worked with dozens of others which would be where they used it. Also Waits recorded for 25+ years before Autotune (much less Melodyne) was even a thing.
    - com2kid 4y ago

alexb_ 4y ago

>I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal I think you are forgetting that the autotune IS their creative intent. T-Pain is probably the most famous heavy autotune user of all time, despite having an amazing voice without it. It's an intentional effect - like how electric guitars aren't "worse" because you aren't hearing the raw sound of the string.

boomskats 4y ago
I know T-Pain is an incredible singer. I know artists use it as an intentional effect. I don't think I'm forgetting anything though, I'm not sure of what your argument is here.

klodolph 4y ago

> I don't want to listen to artists who use autotune. I _do_ want to listen to artists who don't. If you can’t tell the difference, why do you care? If you can tell the difference, why do you need the label? Speaking as an amateur musician, I think these arguments reflect a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision. I’ll say that a big part of the blame lies with poorly used autotune. Just to pick an example, the entire first season of Glee is especially bad, to the point where I want to leave the room. Then there’s various places where autotune has been overused on singers who don’t actually need it to begin with (Bublé comes to mind), or where autotune has been used to cover up some sloppy singing. (Bublé is particularly illustrative—it is known that he uses autotune, but he has said that he doesn’t… I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used. I suspect that many other singers are also unaware that they are being autotuned—but you can sometimes find clear evidence for it when you analyze their songs with a computer.) But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster. The amount of comping and autotune that you do is a matter of style and situation—producers are free to do comping and autotune as they see fit, to capture what they think is the best version of each part. It means that you can say, “take 3 has the most beautiful phrasing and a lot of soul to it, it’s just a little sharp” and then manually adjust the pitch by the amount you think is appropriate. > Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from. I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place, and I can’t reasonably be expected to remember the exact source for every piece of information, nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say.

boomskats 4y ago
> why do you need the label I don't want to get halfway through listening to a song to hit autotuned vox. I just don't, I'd like the option to filter on that. I would like a recommendation/discovery engine that eliminates that anxiety. > a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision Quite the opposite. I understand music production extensively. I studied it, I have used it, half my social circle are studio engineers or conservatoire grads. I just want the option of filtering on artists whose creative vision _is_ the original vocal recording. > I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used The only reason that man has a career is because his geriatric target audience is too old to know what autotune is (hence his denial is plausible). I'm pretty sure his record sales depend almost entirely on the abuse of autotune for the hard of hearing. He isn't an example I'd have used in this argument. > But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster I totally know and appreciate all of this. Recording without it is considerably more effort and money, it's often not economically viable. Nevertheless, I want to be able to sometimes filter on it. > I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place When your argument is your opinion or something drawn from your personal experience, that's fine. However your words were: "Fact is, people say this, but when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular". Stating a 'counterintuitive fact' the way you did suggests it was proven in a study or experiment of some kind. When putting arguments like that forward, most posters on HN tend to reference their sources. Otherwise your 'fact' is just an opinion. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not a 'fact'. If you state something is a fact, I think an expectation that you can back it up with an external reference is entirely reasonable. > nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say Not sure where I said that you were expected to shut up. If I implied it I apologise. However, I stand by my expectations of providing external references for things stated as fact.