“Another autotune rant! By someone else! Agh!”

Yes, I heard you. You said something to the effect of the last line, right? Well, I don’t care.

I decided to try a little experiment as I sat here, bored and…bored. I took the (now mostly finished) mixes of Spatula and Gel Cell, threw Logic’s Pitch Corrector plugin on all the vox tracks, and A/B’d them with the originals. What did I hear?

I heard in-tune harmonies on Spatula. In-tune harmonies which completely missed the point of the whole “diabolical” feel of the vocals.

I heard in-tune doubletracking in Gel Cell. Sure, Adam does a decent job keeping in tune with himself. But in 2009, that doesn’t matter. He can sound like a pitch-perfect robot with just two clicks of a pointing device!

So anyway, I hear you saying, “well, Dan, you play synthesizers for chrissakes! If you’re so against mechanically-produced music, then you must be a hypocrite!”

I retort with this: it may be an oscillator (or sample player) producing the sound, but I am in control of it. If I want to detune it x cents, I have the power to do so. (Normally I don’t).

Lastly, the voice is the one instrument that most fluidly and accurately reproduces the emotion felt by the musician. Vocals are raw, powerful representations of emotion, thoughts, and ideas. With this emotion, there will by fluctuations in pitch. If I want a machine to produce voice (or sound like such), I either use a speech synthesizer or a vocoder (or both). Autotune sucks the human quality of vocals not unlike the way in which a shop-vac cleans the floormats in my car. Which is to say, in a very violent fashion.

So, in short, while it may be tempting from an OCD standpoint to plaster autotune all over our vox tracks, I think it is safe to say that autotune will not be making any appearances on M&C’s album, at least not in any capacity that it was originally designed for.