Question regarding these songs and autotune
I've always been kinda partial to Meghan Trainor. Just in the sense that sometimes I will once in a blue moon listen to All About That Bass. I heard she released a new song (Still Don't Care).
I want to like that song but something about it feels off.
If I listen to All About that Bass, I figured it's been modified in post-production with whatever artists use to make themselves sound a bit better, but when I listen to Still Don't Care, it feels like the amount of auto-tune being used is substantially higher. Like it sounds like more fluff or fake or something. But I am also by no means a singer or someone who has any idea what goes into making a song so maybe I am completely off.
Am I imagining that Still Don't Care is using auto-tune to a higher extent?
I just listened to the song. It seems more like a stylistic choice. It sounds like they’re pitching her higher for the song compared to her more naturally lower singing voice. If anything I think these two songs show the changing trends from this decade compared to last. Where we’re in a bubble dance pop renaissance and now everyone wants to mimic Sabrina Carpenter.
There’s probably other factors here such as her voice changing after having children and some damage just from aging.
yea, it took me some time to realize the big difference that was bothering me was that they pitched her voice higher in the newer song.
So I guess I prefer lower singing female voices? TIL.
I have yet to really know who this person is but if they're responsible for this higher pitch in singing, I already hate them :P
There’s probably higher pitched singers you do like they just have to actually be them.
I wouldn’t say her voice is high pitched necessarily but I was talking more about the style of it all. Listen to Espresso to see what this is likely trying to replicate (another song would be Say So by Doja Cat).
If you hear it, it's a deliberate style choice. Antares AutoTune has been predominantly used for the sound, like one would use a vocoder, since Cher.
If used for actual pitch correction, it's mostly indistinguishable. If you want to sound like T-Pain, you need the singing skill to deliberately miss the notes by just the right amount.
You almost certainly have not heard a song recorded in the past thirty years that doesn't use pitch correction, and now timing correction. It's an essential part of modern studio recording, drastically reducing takes and improving quality.
Celemony released Melodyne in 2000, which makes the original AutoTune look laughably basic. It analyses a recording and renders every sung note visually, allowing you to manually adjust the pitch and timing. The results are absolutely transparent, and you're not ever going to know it was used. And it was. On everything.
The fundamental nature of recoding vocals is they sound absolutely nasty straight out of the microphone/preamp. There's also a whole chain of compression, EQ, and synthetic reverb applied to keep your ears from bleeding. And most songs also layer many takes to get enough presence in the mix.
The truth is most digitally mixed music and even some live performances use auto-tune and retiming (fine-tuning drum hits for example) to correct small mistakes. But it's only done if you wouldn't be able to tell (if you notice it then it's a stylistic choice or a novice engineer) and often the small details like these things are without the explicit foreknowledge of the artist.