National Snack Blog

Fuck Autotune.

Damn, my first ‘proper’ post on our new blog and I’ve broken the no swearing rule in the first sentence. And the second, technically.

FUCK autotune. And quantize.

If you don’t like bad language then I’d stop reading now.

For those of you who don’t know: autotune does what it says on the tin – it’s a way of digitally manipulating a sound file to bring it into tune and iron out imperfections or to pull a sung note to a different pitch/pitches entirely. Quantize is the same but for rhythms. Everyone seems to love it because it’s a clean and easy way of getting a ‘perfect’ take.Autotune/quantise is all over almost everything you will hear that has been produced recently. This applies to small artists like us and big acts, including some that maybe you wouldn’t expect it of such as early Foo Fighters.

I should say at this point that a heavily autotuned sound has evolved into a particular vocal style in it’s own right, (from humble beginnings on that Cher song), and I don’t have a problem with this at all – I personally don’t like it but it’s creative and it makes no attempt to sound natural. It’s a very synthesised/produced sound of vocal, like on Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk, which no-one can deny is a kicking track. They and others are using the process to get a specific, desired sound. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I am talking about is the routine use of  a piece of software to at best cover up mistakes and weak performances and at worst to make absolute gobshite performances from talentless dicks sound musically passable and, more importantly of course, saleable. THIS is bullshit and it goes against everything that music should be.

Good music should make you feel like you’re falling in love. There should be bits in music that make your knees buckle and your stomach churn. It might only be a few notes or beats in a song that get you but they should get you.

There aren’t any words to describe what happens, it just does. It might be anything, it depends what floats your boat musically, it might be the way a sonata progresses, it might be the tone of Leonard Cohens voice, the second chorus from some Chaz n Dave song, anything. For Gem it’s usually chord progressions and cadences, there’s one in particular that get’s her. For me it’s the way the guitar solo starts at about 1:26 of Hound Dog by Elvis, (it’s just filthy guitar playing), or most of John Bonham/Dave Grohls druming or the riff after the solo and at 3:59 in Pulse of The Maggots by Slipknot, (it’s just a filthy riff), or the way Aretha sings. Oh my GOD the way Aretha sings.  But you know that feeling right? Mildly akin to thinking your about to either fly or shit yourself.

This is what I want from my music. It’s a link between the musician/s and me that is absolutely unexplainable but communicates something about their experience of what it is to be alive. It makes me feel like a part of the human race, it makes me feel invincible and it makes me want to bang my head.

Autotune and quantise destroy this for me. One reason is that it makes the music sound too clean and almost inhuman which makes it pretty much impossible for me to connect with.

Another reason is that there is no real way to tell whether the musician or singer that you’re listening to is even any fucking good! When you listen to Elvis singing – he’s singing! He can really do that and he really is sexy! He’s a special human being who does that better than any of the rest of us. As are Billie Holliday, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson etc. etc. They are shithot and they move our souls. If you were in the room with Nina Simone or Motorhead and she/they played you a song you would hear some properly amazing music, (possibly not if it happened at the same time), but I’m not sure you would if you were (locked) in a room with Ronan Keating or N Dubz.

I want to know that the person I am listening to is a proper genius or at least phenomenal at what they do. I will happily take the odd mistake or lack of perfection if it means I know that the other 99.999% of what I’m hearing is as beautiful as I think it is and REAL!

Are we really all such a bunch of terrified consumer zombies that everything we hear needs to be corrected and sanitised first? I don’t think we are.

Music is the food of the soul, right? What happens when all the sustenance that your soul receives is dry, bland, correct and, frankly, soul-less? It’s the imperfections and nuances within the performance that makes each piece of music what it is – a human expression.

So fuck autotune. Right in the wrong’un.