Put Britney Spears into a YouTube search and the third auto-fill on the list is “Britney Spears without Autotune”. Auto-Tune has become the music industry equivalent of doping in the Tour de France circa 2005; we know everyone’s doing it, but we still have a sense of surprise and outrage when it becomes public.

1. Christina Aguilera Photos
2. Antares Auto-tune
3. Christina Aguilera Without Autotune
4. Christina Aguilera Candyman
5. Christina Aguilera Website Official
6. Christina Aguilera Song List

In the last week or so a video has surfaced of the pop singer Britney Spears – with examples of her vocal before and after processing. Whether or not the “before” version is actually the raw material for the “after” version is difficult to say.

• Christina Aguilera appeared in public in Los Angeles on August 10, 2009, wearing a T-shirt that read 'Auto Tune is for Pussies'. When later interviewed by Sirius/XM, however, she said that Auto-Tune could be used 'in a creative way' and noted her song 'Elastic Love' from Bionic uses it.
• Jun 18, 2010  Having previously worn a jersey emblazoned with the words ‘Auto-Tune is for P.ssies’, Christina Aguilera now admits that she has a new-found respect for the device. The singer, who utilised.
• Aug 11, 2009  Christina Aguilera Supports the Death of Autotune. Christina has crawled from under a rock with this t-shirt on. Very interesting that she would wear this shirt seeing that Mariah and Mary J. Blige have both used this technique in their recently released singles.

What’s not difficult to say is that the “before” vocal is distinctly lacking in a demonstrable ability to sing in tune.

What is Auto-Tune?

High quality Christina Aguilera inspired T-Shirts by independent artists and designers from around the world.All orders are custom made and most ship worldwide within 24 hours. Idol participants aren’t permitted to use the popular digital device Auto-Tune to polish their performances. These are people that make Chris Brown a top selling artist. These are people that think Christina Aguilera can sing. These are people that like Hip Hop and think it's actual music. Non-Prince Artists Who Use Auto Tone In Songs. Jul 17, 2014 Brisbane singer Katie Noonan has specified that no Auto-Tune was used on her vocals in the line notes of her records, and American pop star Christina Aguilera has proudly sported an anti Auto-Tune.

For those of you who have managed to avoid all popular music for the past 15 years or so, Auto-Tune is an audio processor, usually used as a plug-in within a Digital Audio Workstation. It is used to correct pitch inaccuracies in monophonic musical material.

Most commonly this musical material is an out of tune vocal performed by someone very young and very attractive – but often not particularly musically talented. This process is known as pitch-correction, and Auto-Tune is the most well known, though by all means not the only, pitch correction software on the market.

The software analyses the incoming material, looks at whether or not it is below what the analyser believes to be the intended pitch (flat) or above the intended pitch (sharp), and then corrects the audio by moving it by the required amount. This is usually measured in cents, with one cent being a hundredth of a semi-tone, the difference in pitch between two keys on a piano.

There are options to determine how long it takes to move the note to the correct pitch, which notes within the musical scale should be used and which should be ignored, and how much of the process takes place. There is even a mode that allows you to draw in the desired melody, regardless of what the input melody is.

What else do producers use to clean up tracks?

Auto-Tune is just one of many tools within a music producer’s (virtual) toolbox.

There are also software tools that can correct the timing of a drummer’s performance and completely change the sound of their drum kit, or fix a guitar’s tuning and timing and make it sound like it was recorded though an expensive, vintage amplifier.

There is now even a plug-in that allows you to superimpose a modelled version of the acoustics of a world-class studio on your recordings – even if they were actually made in your basement.

We deal in illusions

At heart, the job of the music producer is often the same as that of the illusionist. The music producer’s job is to create the illusion that the piece of music the listener hears was created by real people in a room, all playing together with a sense of energy and excitement that was simply captured before being immediately ready for mass consumption.

This is almost never the case. Hours are spent doing multiple takes of a song, with editing then taking place to cut the best performances into one perfect take. Vocals are doubled to help the singer sound stronger. Instruments are overdubbed multiple times to create larger, wider sounding productions.

All of these examples were possible well before digital audio became the norm, and certainly well before Auto-Tune became available.

This is not just the domain of processed pop music either – if you were to take a radio-friendly rock band and listen to what they sound like live in a room compared to their finished fully-produced record, you would see just how much most rock music also benefits from the tricks of the trade.

There are thankfully exceptions – in many genres, though jazz, folk and alt-country spring to mind – but ultimately, since recorded music began, people have been using the technology available to make people sound better than they actually are, as well as to make productions sound larger than life and fit within the style of the day.

The anti-Auto-Tuners

I believe that out of all these tools Auto-Tune gets singled out because the most basic human emotional response to music is the response we have to singing, and finding out that there was some software robot moving the singer’s notes around make us feel cheated.

It messes with our sense of legitimacy. So much so that artists sometimes feel the need to clarify that no digital trickery took place on their productions.

Brisbane singer Katie Noonan has specified that no Auto-Tune was used on her vocals in the line notes of her records, and American pop star Christina Aguilera has proudly sported an anti Auto-Tune T-Shirt. She since admitted to using Auto-Tune, but only as a creative effect.

Creative tweaks

In this case, and as with many musical tools, Auto-Tune gets interesting when taken out of its normal mode of use. Abusing technology has always given us music types rich rewards. An electric guitar was never meant to sound like Jimi Hendrix decided it should. Tape, vacuum tubes and transformers all start sounding a whole lot more interesting when taken to the edge of distortion, and quite often over that edge too.

In fact, Auto-Tune’s arrival into the public’s consciousness was a result of Believe, the massive Cher hit from 1998, a prime example of the software being used in a manner that was most probably completely unintended by its developers.

Well-known artists such as Kanye West and T-Pain have also abused Auto-Tune to great success, and more underground indie artists such as Polica are doing it too.

So it’s not all bad, and just like most tools Auto-Tune can be used in interesting, creative ways. It can also be a real time-saver in the studio. While the types of music I tend to work on don’t require it, in the past it has helped save both me and the singer I was working with from hours of extra vocal tracking and editing, along with maintaining stylistic appropriateness.

Why do we listen to Britney?

All that said, Auto-Tune is still frequently used to make marketable, though often musically talentless people, presentable for public consumption. We all knew that anyway.

Nobody ever went to a Britney show to be blown away by vocal pyrotechnics. They went for the actual pyrotechnics, along with the dancing, laser show, costume changes – and the chance to see the pop star from the TV in real life.

The biggest problem with correction tools such Auto-Tune is that they breed mediocrity and laziness in a new generation of singers and musicians.

Young musicians today are well aware of the tools available in the studio to fix their mistakes and, in my experience, are all too happy to use them. This often comes at the expense of practice and dedication to the improvement of their craft.

Ultimately, we need to recognise and acknowledge acts such as Britney Spears as entertainment rather than an expression of musicality. We should just try to make sure that the tools of the trade used in making pop stars pitch perfect don’t interfere with the development of singers who actually want to be able to sing.

Auto-Tune is a proprietary^[2]audio processor made by Antares Audio Technologies. Auto-Tune uses a ph vocoder to fix pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to hide out of tune singing and mistakes. It lets singers perform perfectly tuned vocal tracks without needing to sing in tune. /atmosphere-pad-vst-free-download.html. Its main purpose is to slightly bend sung pitches to the nearest true semitone. Auto-Tune can also be used as an effect to distort the human voice when pitch is raised/lowered a lot.^[3]

Auto-Tune can be used as a plug-in for professional audio multi-tracking suites used in a studio setting, and as a stand-alone, rack-mounted unit for live performance processing.^[4] Auto-Tune has become standard equipment in professional recording studios.^[5]

Auto-Tune was first created by Andy Hildebrand, an engineer working for Exxon. Hildebrand developed methods for interpreting seismic data, and then realized that the technology could be used to detect, analyze, and modify pitch.^[3]

In popular music[changechange source]

Auto-Tune was used for vocal effects on Cher's 'Believe', recorded in 1998. This was the first major hit song to use the software for this purpose. At first the sound engineers claimed that they had used a vocoder, in what Sound on Sound said was an attempt to keep a trade secret.^[6] After the massive success of 'Believe', many artists copied the technique, which became known as the 'Cher Effect'. It can be heard in songs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some notable examples are Gigi D'Agostino's 'La Passion' and Janet Jackson's US Number 1 hit 'All For You'. Auto-Tune became famous again in the mid-2000s when R&B singer T-Pain made active use of it in his songs.^[7] This technique has been copied by many other modern R&B and pop artists, including Usher, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Justin Bieber. T-Pain has even had an iPhoneApp named after him that copies the effect called 'I Am T-Pain'.^[8]

The Boston Herald revealed that country music stars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have both said they are using Auto-Tune in performance. They said it is a safety net that guarantees a good performance.^[9]Sara Evans, John Michael Montgomery and Gary LeVox of the group Rascal Flatts also use Auto-Tune to fix pitch problems. However, other country music singers, such as Loretta Lynn, Allison Moorer, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks, Martina McBride, and Patty Loveless, have refused to use Auto-Tune.^[10]

YouTube musical group The Gregory Brothers have joined their original music tracks with Auto-Tuned versions of mundane evening news video clips, making fun of everyone from President Barack Obama to Antoine Dodson. The popularity of their YouTube channel led the Gregory Brothers to release many of their songs on iTunes.

Artist backlash[changechange source]

In 2002, the CD Miss Fortune by singer-songwriter Allison Moorer was released with a sticker stating that 'Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch correction was used in the making of this record'.^[11] At the 51st Grammy Awards in early 2009, the band Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons to protest the use of Auto-Tune in the music industry.^[12] Later that spring, Jay-Z named the lead single of his album The Blueprint 3 as 'D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)'. Jay-Z said that far too many people had jumped on the Auto-Tune bandwagon and that the trend had become a gimmick.^[13][14]Christina Aguilera appeared in public in Los Angeles on August 10, 2009 wearing a T-shirt that read, 'Auto Tune is for Pussies'.^[15] However, when interviewed by Sirius/XM, she said that Auto-Tune wasn't bad if used '.in a creative way'. She said her album Bionic uses the technology and highlighted 'Elastic Love' being a product of it.^[16]

Criticism[changechange source]

Opponents of the plug-in argue Auto-Tune people will not treat musicians with respect in they need help to stay in tune. A Chicago Tribune report from 2003 states that 'many successful mainstream artists in most genres of music—perhaps a majority of artists—are using pitch correction'.^[11]

Christina Aguilera Photos

In 2004, The Daily Telegraph music critic Neil McCormick called Auto-Tune a 'particularly sinister invention that has been putting extra shine on pop vocals since the 1990s' by taking 'a poorly sung note and transpos[ing] it, placing it dead center of where it was meant to be'.^[17]

In 2009, Time magazine quoted an unnamed Grammy-winning recording engineer as saying, 'Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box.' The same article hoped 'that pop's fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade', commenting that pop-music songs are sounding the same, as 'track after track has perfect pitch.'^[18][19] Timothy Powell, a producer/engineer stated in 2003 that he is 'even starting to see vocal tuning devices show up in concert settings'; he states that 'That's more of an ethical dilemma—people pay a premium dollar to see artists and artists want people to see them at their best.'^[11]

The American television series Glee uses Auto-Tune in its songs. E! Online's Joal Ryan criticized the show for its 'overproduced soundtrack', in particular, complaining that many songs rely too heavily on the software.^[20]

In 2010, there was controversy when British television reality TV show, The X Factor had been accused of using Auto-Tune to improve the voices of contestants, especially Gamu Nhengu.^[21][22]Simon Cowell ordered a ban on Auto-Tune for future episodes.^[23]

Antares Auto-tune

References[changechange source]

Christina Aguilera Without Autotune

1. ↑Antares history page
2. ↑Harold A. Hildebrand, 'Pitch detection and intonation correction apparatus and method', US patent 5973252, published 1999-10-26, issued 1999-10-26
3. ↑ ^3.03.1Frere Jones, Sasha. 'The Gerbil's Revenge', The New Yorker, June 9, 2008
4. ↑Antares product page
5. ↑Everett-Green, Robert. 'Ruled by Frankenmusic,' The Globe and Mail, October 14, 2006, p. R1.
6. ↑'Recording Cher's 'Believe'
7. ↑Singers do better with T-Pain relief
8. ↑I Am T-Pain at Smule.com
9. ↑Treacy, Christopher John. 'Pitch-adjusting software brings studio tricks,' The Boston Herald, February 19, 2007, Monday, 'The Edge' p. 32.
10. ↑McCall, Michael. Pro Tools: A number of leading country artists sing off key. But a magical piece of software-Pro Tools-makes them sound as good as gold.'
11. ↑ ^11.011.111.2Ryan, Maureen (27 April 2003). 'What, no pitch correction?'(PDF). Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
12. ↑'Death Cab for Cutie protests Auto-Tune'. Idiomag.com. 2009-02-12. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
13. ↑Reid, Shaheem (2009-06-06). 'Jay-Z Premiers New Song, 'D.O.A.': 'Death Of Auto-Tune''. MTV. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
14. ↑Reid, Shaheem (2009-06-10). 'Jay-Z Blames Wendy's Commercial—Partially—For His 'Death Of Auto-Tune''. MTV. MTV Networks. Retrieved 2009-06-10.
15. ↑DIRRTYHONEY (2009-08-11). 'Christina Aguilera Joins Jay Z's Anti-Autotune Movement'. Popsugar. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
16. ↑Christina Aguilera Talks Use of Auto-Tune on SIRIUS XM June 17, 2010
17. ↑McCormick, Neil (2004-10-13). 'The truth about lip-synching'. The Age. Melbourne. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
18. ↑Tyrangiel, Josh, 'Singer's Little Helper,' Time, February 5, 2009
19. ↑Note that the phrase perfect pitch is used here in an erroneous manner, as it refers to a very rare ability, not the mere ability to sing in tune; in general a skilled singer can be expected not to sound off-key.
20. ↑Ryan, Joal (October 23, 2009). 'Glee's Great, but the Music Ain't'. E! Online. Retrieved 2009-11-19.
21. ↑X Factor admits tweaking vocals
22. ↑'X Factor 2010: Outraged viewers take to Twitter to complain 'auto-tune' technology was used on first episode'. Daily Mail. London. 2010-08-22.
23. ↑Sam-Daliri, Nadia (2010-08-26). 'Angry Simon Cowell bans Auto-tuning'. The Sun. London.

Christina Aguilera Candyman

Other websites[changechange source]

Christina Aguilera Website Official

• TuneWorx - a pitch correcting module from SpectrumWorx
• Antares Auto-Tune EVO Pitch Correcting Plug-In – product home page
• Pitchfork: Neko Case Interview – artistic integrity and Auto-Tune
• CBC Radio OneQ: The Podcast for Thursday June 25, 2009MP3 – NPR's Tom Moon on the takeover of the Autotune.
• 'Auto-Tune', NOVA scienceNOW, PBS TV, June 30, 2009
• KnowYourMeme: Auto-Tune, the history of Auto-Tune and current use in popular media

Christina Aguilera Song List