I thought the conversation was cruising at a very reasonable altitude.
People having a civil conversation.
If I may ask, how did this conversation, in your mind, necessitate being “brought back down to earth?”
“A reality check, if you will.” Frankly, there is a pompous tone to that statement.
A “reality check”…thank heavens frogman is here to “educate” us.
I don’t characterize this issue as being about “purist” vs. “non-purist.”
As I said in the OP, it is about honesty.
To an artist/producer that releases vocal recordings, or performs “live,” (very intentional use of quotation marks there) under the pretense that the vocalist is…singing…I have a request, “don’t pee on my shoes on tell me it’s raining.”
It’s false advertising.
I love Kraftwerk. Love them.
They, and artists of a similar type, tell me right out: “these vocals are a certain way,” and I know what I’m getting. and it’s all good.
Some kid with an acoustic guitar, wanted me to buy their music, is telling me something different from what the Kraftwerk-type artists are telling me.
They’re saying, “listen to my singing! Buy my record!”
Well, I’d be happy to, kid, but your end of the bargain means not lying to me.
If the “bad part” of the performance is such a tiny segment of the performance, then they can easily punch in that 4-second part and be done with it, and have a vocal recording that actually is the thing they’re advertising: a human expression of vocalization.
It is just lazy and disrespectful to the buyer to do the DPC thing.
Often, the “bad note” wasn’t “bad” at all.
We’ve all heard vocal performances from the past 100 years that caused us to feel deep emotions, all of which had moments of pitchy-ness. All of them.
Pop, opera, all corners of the musical universe…non-perfect pitch is a matter of course with vocal performance, and we all, rightfully, love it.
Personally, I find the vocal performance that was shoehorned into digitally-dictated pitch to be aesthetically ugly and bad-sounding, which makes this practice all the more maddening.
If it actually made vocals sound better, we could have a real argument here.
It doesn’t.
Please, Planet Earth, I beg of you…stop using digital pitch correction software.
I would say a normal person only notices “pitchy-ness” when it’s particularly egregious. Obviously, that is not acceptable in a professional situation, and needs to be remedied.
The idea that such a remedy must be via digital pitch correction software is pure bunk.
The apologia that comes into play at this point, i.e. “recording is too expensive, so we won’t call the singer back in to re-take”….BS.
It’s enough to cause me to wonder if we should actually have a label on the release: “Vocals recorded with digital pitch correction software,” should the proprietors want to be honest.
I’m being semi-serious with that last bit, but I think I’ve made my point.