My Friday night gigs go a little more mainstream that I would otherwise prefer to play. I am always getting requests for cheesy-ass hip hop and r&b that is heavy on the auto-tune. It was interesting for a second, but I’ve been calling out all of the autotune artists for a while and can’t believe it took this long for real musicians to finally make fun of the shit. No, I won’t play Flo Rida or T-Pain, even if he is on a boat. And while I could momentarily appreciate some of the Lil Wayne album and Kanye’s “Love Lockdown,” it does sound like “a robot going through puberty.”
Below are the mp3s for Jay-Z’s new track “Death of Autotune (D.O.A.),” as well as Wyclef Jean and Nick Cannon making fun of autotune artists in “Mr. Autotune,” and Apathy mocking Kanye West in his remix of Love Lockdown.
If ya don’t know…
Auto-Tune uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings. The term “autotune” is also used to refer to pitch correction technologies developed by other companies.
In addition to being used to subtly change pitch, with some settings it can be used as an effect to deliberately distort the human voice.
Eventually, the trend of using Auto tune started fading by late 2002. During the period of 2003-2005 the “Cher Effect” was completely abandoned by pop and hip-hop artists. It was occasionally used by dance, trance or electronica acts, but not to the the extent to which it was used during the period of 1998-2002.
The effect was revived by R&B singer T-Pain, who elaborated on the “Cher effect” in contemporary popular music by making active use of it in his songs, a style that has since gone on to be imitated by numerous other R&B and pop-music artists such as Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg.[8].
By the late 2000s these artists made extensive use of the “Cher effect”: Rihanna, Madonna, Britney Spears, Ron Browz, Black-Eyed Peas, Jeremih, Flo Rida, Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, Kanye West, Ciara, Akon, and Lady Gaga (As on her album The Fame, song “Paper Gangsta”).[citation needed]
Rapper Kanye West used Auto-Tune prominently on his 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak, saying that he “loves using Auto-Tune.”[9].
The first single from Jay-Z’s 2009 album The Blueprint³ is titled “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)“. West, who co-produced the album, told MTV in a May 2009 interview, “We actually removed all the songs with Auto-Tune off of his album, to make the point that this is an anti-Auto-Tune album, even though I released an album that has all Auto-Tune!
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 soundtrack albums. And every singer now presumes that you’ll just run their voice through the box.” The same article expressed “hope that pop’s fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade,” speculating that pop-music songs have become harder to differentiate from one another, as “track after track has perfect pitch.”[11] At the 51st Grammy Awards, Seattle band Death Cab for Cutie made an appearance wearing blue ribbons to protest the use of Auto-Tune in the music industry.[12]
The Auto-Tune effect has come under intense scrutiny within the Hip-Hop community[13], the most noteworthy being Jay-Z’s single “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)“[14]. Underground artist Apathy heavily criticized the likes of Lil Wayne, T-Pain, and Kanye West on a remix of the song Love Lockdown. In the song he comments that West sounded like “a robot going through puberty”[15] and mentions that the first time he had heard the effect was on Cher albums.
MP3: Jay Z – D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)
MP3: Wyclef Jean ft. Nick Cannon – Mr. Autotune
MP3: Apathy – Love Lockdown Remix
interesting. it has its place, it can be cool sort of if used creatively, but the blantant overuse of it is not good news for anyone..haha .. kinda painful to the ears after time.
it does have its own place in music and that place is almost fully occupied with electronic musicians and producers in dance oriented music where the lyrics are no more than an added layer of melody rather than vocals which are mostly the focal point of a track in most other genres. I think it’s funny that JayZ album apparently did have autotune but removed it to keep its singles message consistent throughout the album.