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Other sonic tricks have had their moment--notably Peter Frampton's "talk- box," a plastic tube that made his guitar sound as if it were talking--but in skilled hands, Auto-Tune is the rare gimmick that can lead to innovation. On T-Pain's latest album, Thr33 Ringz, tracks like "Karaoke" and "Chopped N Skrewed" literally bounce between notes, giving the record a kids-on--Pop Rocks exuberance. Using the same program, West's 808s & Heartbreak is the complete opposite--angsty, slow and brutally introspective. West sings throughout, and while he couldn't have hit most of the notes...
Plenty of critics raved about West's use of Auto-Tune, but T-Pain is often dismissed as a novelty act. (Not that he minds: "I'd rather be known for something than unknown for nothing.") But unlike most singers, he acknowledges the impact Auto-Tune has had on his career. Of the half a dozen engineers and producers interviewed for this story, none could remember a pop recording session in the past few years when Auto-Tune didn't make a cameo--and none could think of a singer who would want that fact known. "There's no shame...
...Some Auto-Tuning is almost unavoidable. Most contemporary music is composed on Pro Tools, a program that lets musicians and engineers record into a computer and map out songs on a visual grid. You can cut at one point on the grid and paste at another, just as in word-processing, but making sure the cuts match up requires the even pitch that Auto-Tune provides. "It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation...
Rubin, who's produced artists as diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Metallica, worries that the safety net of Auto-Tune is making singers lazy. "Sometimes a singer will do lots of takes when they're recording a song, and you really can hear the emotional difference when someone does a great performance vs. an average one," says Rubin. "If you're pitch-correcting, you might not bother to make the effort. You might just get it done and put it through the machine so it's all in tune." Rubin has taken to having an ethical conversation before each...
With the exception of Milli Vanilli's, pop listeners have always been fairly indulgent about performers' ethics. It's hits that matter, and the average person listening to just one pop song on the radio will have a hard time hearing Auto-Tune's impact; it's effectively deceptive. But when track after track has perfect pitch, the songs are harder to differentiate from one another--which explains why pop is in a pretty serious lull at the moment. It also changes the way we hear unaffected voices. "The other day, someone was talking about how Aretha Franklin...