Written by Chris Simoni Wednesday, 12 August 2009 00:00

There are certain things on songs that date them for a particular era. In the early 1970’s it was the electric piano and miniMoog keyboard, and later in disco was the wah-wah guitar. In the early 1980’s you have the Yamaha DX7 keyboard that was on literally every pop song along with the Roland 808 drum machine (Duran, Duran, Donna Summer). There are some songs that are timeless, because they don’t use the gimmicks of the day. Old fashion guitar and Hammond B3 organ will never get old, and always sound fresh, because they have been in rock music, since the beginning. What is the current new wave of technology that is sure to date a song in the new millennium? Auto-tune.

Antares Auto-tune made its debut back in 1996, and is still being used today. Of course, when used properly, its effect is virtually undetectable. Auto-tune corrects the pitch of the vocals. If the singer sings slightly off key, the software makes corrections to the vocal performance to bring it to proper pitch. To many recording engineers, auto-tune (or AT) is similar to using spell check on your word processor. If you are writing a paper, do you consider it cheating if you check your spelling with the word processor? Probably not, and that is the same reasoning musicians use referring to tiny corrections to their vocal performance. Auto-tune is used on every performance these days, to some degree.

While using auto-tune is fine for correcting vocals, some artists have taken it to another level, by using it as an effect on their vocals. Artists like T-Pain have used auto-tune as a part of their vocal sound. The auto-tune vocoder effect is intended to be obvious, and is easily detectable. The vocals have a robotic, mechanical nature to them, such as in the Cher song “Believe”.

While using this vocoder (auto-tune) effect may sound great for the time being, it is not a sound that will stand the test of time. The original vocoder originally made an appearance in songs in the 70’s, such as “Funkytown” and “Goodnight Tonight”. Soon its overuse will cause it to subside in popularity, and the pop music fans (zombies) will wake up and take notice, just as they did in the 70’s, and quit buying those songs.

Those artists using the AT vocoder today are probably only looking at vocoder use as a way to make easy money, without having to sing well. Soon, they will need to find new work, because when this fad is over, they still can’t sing.

In summary:

Auto-tune=good

Auto-tune as vocoder=bad