I don't think it's a good development. it's another step on the road to completely synthetic music. Who needs artists? They're such a pain in the butt.
The use of digital pitch correction software on vocal recordings
To my mind, this practice is fraught with dishonesty.
The most obvious issue is:
- with digital pitch correction software applied to it, a vocal recording presented to the listener is done so under the pretense that it presents the human voice singing, when in fact any number of moments therein are the result of a program shoehorning the human-produced tones into a “perfect” tone” (whether it may be a Bb, C, F#, Db, or whatever), thereby negating the human expression and negating the validity of the pretense.
Much like a photo portrait of a human body post-airbrushing ceases to be a “true” presentation of that body, the viewer is not being presented with a faithful representation of that human form.
The next issue is:
- rampant apologia within the industry.
I’ve even heard an industry insider say, “pitch manipulation software does nothing we couldn’t do in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It just lets us do it for a lot less money.”
That’s a cute thing to say, but incorrect.
The finished vocal recording that was changed by the implementation of pitch correction software is, by definition, different from the finished vocal recording featuring none.
I am welcoming the thoughts of Audiogon members regarding this practice.
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@fuzztone my use of the term, “presented with (blank)…” is just a way to say, “a person listening to something.” |
I used to experiment with pitch shift/harmonization when I spent time playing guitar (years ago). Lexicon and Eventide made amazing studio rack mounts that enabled one to be very creative. |
I'm a singer who's recorded many times. Unless you're a singer you wouldn't know how hard it is even for pros to record a great vocal track. 95% of the track can be perfect (though it might have taken 10-20 attempts) but there can still be one word- even a part of a word - that's "pitchy". Either the engineer can hunt around in the previous 10-20 takes to find that word sung on pitch or he can tweak that one word to get it on pitch (as long as it's only slightly off- too far off and it can't be corrected). Sometimes it makes sense to just fix the one word. |
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