Learning To Listen To Real Music Again

Commentary and Analysis by Mitch Santell
Producer and Co-Founder

Music plays a major role in my life as I am sure it does in yours. Yes, I grew up in an era of analog recordings real to real tape and vinyl pop's and click's.

Auto-Tune is one of those weird technology's that allow an off key singer to sound like they sing perfectly. Since it was introduced in 1996, this technology has become a standard in he music business and by a majority of major artists.

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What is auto-tune?

Auto tune is a dirty little secret that the music industry incorporated into their album (artist) productions back in 1998.

Basically, it allows a singer who can't hold a note to sound like they are on key. More than any other form of music, I have found that the majority of Reggae Bands and artists do not use auto-tune. The reason I love this so much is that some of the tracks we play here at Big Reggae Mix are off key and all I can say is HOW EXCITING!

According to many people who have studied how the music business used to work and what it has become now, seem very upset.

Here is a little background and some commentary on Auto-Tune:

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Auto-Tune Module

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Auto-Tune was invented by an engineer named Andy Hildebrand in 1996. Hildebrand grew up playing the flute and became a professional studio musician, specializing in symphonic music, by the age of 16. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in digital signal processing, a branch of electrical engineering, and worked as a geophysicist for Exxon Mobil for a number of years, using sound waves to search for fossil fuels. Eventually he returned to his passion and began working in signal processing for music.

A few years into his new career, he was having lunch with a singer who asked if he could make a box that would make her voice in tune. Nobody else at his table seemed drawn to the idea—they were embarrassed for the singer because they assumed it couldn't be done—so he let it go. But Hildebrand knew the math wasn't any different from any other application of signal processing. The trick was to adjust a sound’s pitch without changing its playback speed  After mulling over the idea while he worked on a different project, he returned to it a year later and spent a month building a prototype that he could present at a trade show. The response was instantaneous.

“People were ripping it out of my hands,” he recalled. “Producers wanted it badly.”

“It's gotten such a bad name for so long because it's like 'Oh, you use Auto-Tune?' Yeah, of course you use Auto-Tune,” he says. “You're singing into six-, seven-thousand-dollar microphones, they didn't have those in the '60s… If technology comes along that improves a sound, that improves workflow or performance or overall feel, then you use it. It doesn't mean you're not talented. It means you're talented and somebody has the foresight to apply some great technology to your project. That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing.”

​Read the rest here: http://bit.ly/2a8wJhF

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