Tag: autotune

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The Drones of Transient Pitchyness

This is how it’s done.

This is the death of real singing.  Any half-decent singer can now sound “decent”, that is, on pitch.  The penalty is obvious if you know what to listen for: that odd ambient tunnelling of the voice, the weird tiny echo, the synthesis of algorithm and vocal expression.

From the point of view of an “artist”–but especially a producer or engineer– the appeal is irresistible.  A singer only has to be close– not perfect.  Before Autotune, you needed twenty, thirty, or forty takes to get something “right”.  Now a take or two and a software application can do it in 20 minutes or less.  It will iron out the flaws and fluctuations and produce perfect pitch with a tiny smidgeon of robotic tone, for the lead, for harmonies, for background vocals.  But the cost is the hard to describe: the feeling of authenticity, of humanity, of real human tone.

Most people in the industry would find my distaste for it bewildering.  Don’t you want perfect pitch?  Don’t you want flawless musicality?  Don’t you want that style that buzzes by your ear without the slightest hint of variation or personality or character or the richness of the random?  Don’t you want music that anesthetizes and soothes and washes over you like silky bubbles of insubstantial gloss?

No, I don’t.  I would rather listen to Frank Watkinson.  Give me his all too human flaws any day over Beyonce or Katie Perry or Taylor Swift and all the other manufactured factory drones that pass for artistry nowadays.  And what do I love about Frank more than anything else?  This comment:

“I’ve never had an ambition to go out at night, traveling, going to places and playing and that, because I personally wouldn’t pay to see myself.”

There will be a small constituency for the real out there.  But most pop has succumbed to the Autotune disease.

Give me Leonard Cohen and Neil Young and Iron & Wine and the Civil Wars and Tom Waits and Neutral Milk Hotel and Bruce Springsteen and, yes, Bob Dylan, instead.  And the next time you listen to one of the drones and think they sound just great, thank you, remember: you’ve been cheated.

 

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Roy Orbison: “A Black and White Night”

Roy Orbison has one of the three or four truly great voices of rock’n’roll. In 1988, just a year or so before he died of a heart attack at 52 (December 6, 1988), he recorded a tribute concert to himself called “A Black and White Night”.

You may wonder, what on earth do I mean by “to himself”. I mean that the project was financed, managed, and controlled by Orbison’s production company. It was “directed” by Tony Mitchell, a gentleman from my home town, Kitchener, Ontario. But Orbison had final cut and control of the film.

This is not the same kind of film as the one we got when Marty Scorcese directed the greatest rock’n’roll film of all time “The Last Waltz” with The Band (some would argue “Stop Making Sense” with the Talking Heads).

There is no rational artistic reason why it’s in black and white, and this video is a poster child for why some people believe in the principle of artistic economy, which is, if you don’t have any ideas at all about what you are doing with the camera (or mic, or paintbrush, or keyboard), replace artistry with volume or quantity. Go up to 11. Or, In this case, have the camera swoop back and forth and up and down and left and right and in and out, for no reason whatsoever other than to make it appear that you are doing something with the camera to make this production visually interesting.

There are moments when the musicians appear to be out of sync. There are even moments where they appear to be hamming it up. Could be that an editor dumped in a few shots taken out of sequence just for effect. Or there were dubs.

“A Black & White Night” is well recorded. Too well-recorded. I am convinced it was dubbed, though every effort appears to have been made to make it appear to be a live recording. You would think that nowadays it would be easy to find out the truth: it’s not. I’ve been searching the internet and all I can find it indirect references to it and drippy, adoring reviews by slavish worshippers of Roy Orbison.

Let’s keep that straight: I am an admirer of Orbison but here it is: Orbison is a truly great but one-dimensional romanticist whose work has limited importance. He was the master of the paranoid, masochistic, break-up song, in which the pain of the loss is elevated to a near hysterical embrace of spiritual and emotional suffering.

You might be surprised that this mode can only go so far.

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight

Yes, those opening lines, the black suit, the sunglasses– truly magnificent.

But a lot of his early success may well have been due to arranger Fred Foster at Monument Records (where Orbison recorded from 1959 to 1965). After Foster left, Orbison rarely charted, until his return during the nostalgia craze in the 1980’s.

But, like Elvis and Michael Jackson, he was a pop star, and never more than that, and he doesn’t belong in the category of the truly visionary, brilliant minds that made rock music worth paying attention to, and made it more relevant and interesting than any other musical style in the past fifty years.

People who tell you the contrary just want to believe that a facile adoration of the sound of a voice is just as valid as an intelligent grasp of the fundamentals of music and idiom and lyric and melody and arrangement in terms of judging a musical performance.

Obscure note: like Elvis, Roy Orbison died on the toilet.

You really should see the performance of “Crying”, in Spanish, in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”.

The handful of truly great voices in rock’n’roll:

Roy Orbison
Judith Durham (The Seekers)
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
Jennifer Warnes
Aretha Franklin
Janis Joplin
Van Morrison

Burton Cummings

And a bigger handful of extraordinary voices:

Judy Collins
Elvis Presley
Art Garfunkel
Tom Waits
Susan Jacks
Reverend Al Green
James Brown
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Over-rated Voices:

Freddie Mercury
Kate Bush
Roger Daltrey
Linda Ronstadt
K. D. Lang
Bruce Springsteen

Why over-rated?

A great singer puts his or her voice into the service of the music, not into the service of the singer’s ego, K.D. Lang.  Roger Daltrey has a big voice, but he’s not really a particularly good singer. Linda Ronstadt: ditto: she gets louder and softer and louder again. She wails.  Listen to her version of “Different Drum” and then listen to Susan Jacks’ version: that’s the difference between wailing and singing.  Kate Bush is a diva: fabulous voice, and a show-off.  Burton Cummings has a great voice and he can sing, but never covered anything really super interesting. One imagines that if he did, the limitations would reveal themselves. Freddie Mercury can never be forgiven for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Don’t even get me started:

Whitney Houston (whine)
Michael Jackson (grunt, falsetto, grunt)

No Longer Qualified

Almost all recent singers, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katie Perry, Britney Spears, Kesha, Lil Wayne, Nicky Minaj, Ariana Grande, and so on and so on, use Autotune.  They are cheating.  And does Autotune really make them sound better?  No, it doesn’t.  It just speeds up the recording process and takes out the obvious flubs.

Some of these artists claim that autotune is an artistic component of “their sound”.  Oh yes, and EPO is an integral part of Lance Armstrong’s “ride”.

Great Songwriters and their voices

Bob Dylan is actually a pretty good vocalist on his earlier albums, up to “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”.  Singing isn’t just about pitch: there’s phrasing and intonation and rhythm.  Around “Saved” his voice went into the tank and I don’t think any one around him ever summoned the courage to tell him the truth.  His voice is cosmetically in the class of Tom Waits but he’s not nearly as judicious with it’s use.

As the years go by, I think less and less of Bruce Springsteen as a vocalist the more I hear him.  Even when I go back to “Born to Run”, I find it harder and harder to overlook his limitations. His voice is not really much prettier than early Dylan’s, but Dylan is far more interesting, in phrasing, intonation; sometimes a good sneer can come in handy.

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Oh Neil Simon! Oh Mary Tyler Moore!

Neil Simon is not exactly Chekov. In fact, he’s not even Neil Simon anymore, having long ago sold-out on his quirky if tired stereotypes and embraced “playwriting for people who think that writers think about things that matter while they don’t.”

In other words, his characters have dilemmas that you think you might have if you were in a play by a rich and pretentious play-write. You won’t be surprised by this dilemma. You won’t be disturbed by it. You will leave the theatre, amused at being amused.

So I find it ironic that he was upset when he discovered that Mary Tyler Moore, who was starring in his most recent play, had not memorized her lines. She was wearing an earpiece at rehearsals, so she could receive prompts. The article about this in the New York Times was not clear as to whether or not the play was actually into production at this time, but it is clear that Neil Simon believed that Mary Tyler Moore was going to wear the ear-piece during performances. He sent her a note saying, get rid of the ear piece or get out of my play.

Mary Tyler Moore got out of the play.

Well, isn’t that a sad story? Mary Tyler Moore is, like, about 80. Well, 60 or something anyway. It must be hard to memorize lines at that age. It must be hard for her to have a famous play-write tell her she wasn’t good enough for his play. Neil Simon is pretty old himself. He hasn’t had a hit in years. He has a feel for dialogue and character-based humour and a person’s idiosyncrasies, but he hasn’t written anything really important, ever. But he is good enough to fire Ms. Moore.

Neil Simon, bless his naïve little heart, admitted that he didn’t know that many other actors were now using ear-pieces during actual performances. Simon said that if he had only known that, he wouldn’t have been so harsh on Mary Tyler Moore.

It sounds a lot like Mr. Simon is reacting to the blowback of him rudely firing an esteemed elderly actress.  Mary Tyler Moore, after all, is a celebrity.  People want you to think they have a relationship with her and really care about her, when what they really care about is being perceived to not be heartless.

My sympathy for Ms. Moore is limited by the fact that she was in the play in the first place because her celebrity status would attract ticket-buyers despite the fact that many better actresses could have played that role more convincingly.  Doing live theatre confers status on celebrity actors who are primarily known for television roles.  She shouldn’t have “auditioned” for the play if she couldn’t memorize lines.

I doubt that Mr. Simon did not mean it: get out of my play.

[As I write this, I think: you see why I’m not popular?]

So next time you pay $65 for a seat at a theatre somewhere, don’t think for one moment that it is mightily impressive that the actors learned their parts.

They might have.

They might not have.

Barry Bonds might have hit all those home runs without the assistance of chemicals. He might not. Madonna might be singing— it might just be dubbed. Those might be Demi Moore’s natural breasts, or they might not be. (Check out a movie called “About Last Night” if you’re seriously wondering).  Beyonce might have great pitch: it is very likely her vocals are autotuned (in fact, judging from radio play, the vast majority of vocalists today are autotuned.)

I know some people think that being concerned about honesty and authenticity nowadays is really rather quaint and precious. Aren’t we all little frauds in our own way? Do any of us admit to our friends and family that we’re really not as smart or good or wise as they think we are?

Sure we are.

But we don’t charge people $65 a seat to come and listen to us.