While I'm on the subject of Analog Recording...

I was surfing the web this evening and stopped over at one of my favorite sites, The Superficial. Normally I check it every day but I have been very busy at school this week so as I was catching up I found an interesting post about a new Britney Spears song and how bad it was. Well I thought I'd follow the link and hear for myself and sure enough it is very, very bad. Now I know I am not the target market for a Britney Spears album, but what made it so bad was the over production. Since I have been in school for recording, I have started listening to music in a different way. I listen for what's going on with the effects and with instrument placement in the mix.

As we move farther away from analog recording and closer to purely digital recording, we as engineers, run the risk of getting "too fancy" with all the digital tricks that we can perform to fix problems with instruments or vocals in the post production process. One such tool that I have learned about is called Auto Tune. Auto Tune is a plug-in for recording and mixing software that allows the engineer to actually manipulate a vocal so that it will always be on the correct pitch. So if a singer misses a note or two, it can be fixed. However, pop music has been using it more to turn a pretty face with no musical talent into a pop star. Ashlee Simpson is a perfect example. Although she'd never admit it, one of the reasons she was using a backing track (i.e. lip syncing track) on SNL is that she can't actually hit the notes she hits on record. It is all done with Auto Tune. And she is not the the only one. Most pop singers are tuned in the studio. And it doesn't stop there. It goes all the way to the heart of country music in Nashville, TN.

Auto Tune used sparingly is okay, but when taken to extremes, the singer no longer sounds human but rather more like a computer. This is what I thought of while listening to Britney's new single. If you listen to it, it sounds inhuman, especially in the chorus. Frankly I'm surprised that this made it out of a studio. It just doesn't sound good at all. I only hope that people will notice just how strange the vocals sound and realize that this has been going on for a long time. Can't we just go back to the days when people could actually sing and not worry so much about how pretty they are?