WITHOUT AUTO TUNE

I recently read an insulting comment on one of my pupils youtube site. It was a school child bully I am guessing but it mentioned her need for auto tune...well hey ho I thought. This is such an ignorant comment I shall have to rant on my blog. This singer has perfect pitch, which is an awesome and wondrous gift. It is also a serious  problem at times. The recording she has made was more or less a live recording. It was in a small studio with one take on the vocals. We did not want to magic up perfection as the live sound is lovely.

On the subject of perfect pitch: If anything around her is off pitch she struggles to cope. This makes it hard for her in duets, especially acappella. No matter how wonderful the other singer's voice is, they may slip down in pitch slightly. When this happened to this singer she had a crisis with her own pitch and felt awful. I stepped in gave quiet chords to get them back into pitch. She has come to realise this and can now compensate, but it used to physically upset her in a powerful way. She has an innate sense of her own perfection of pitch.

I hear now that karaoke is sung through auto tuners sometimes. What fresh hell is this? Not only are people now deeply confusing art with sport by singing in a race to keep up with automated backings, but they are also reaching new heights of NOT LISTENING, by not having to listen.

Auto tune belongs in the studio where it is brilliant for tweeking those moments that used to have be re recorded by bouncing in. Auto tune saves studio time and money. I get that: Studio time is very expensive.

Without auto tune we have the natural voice which fluctuates between perfection and its unique quirkiness. Without auto tune we are forced to listen so intently that it is meditative.

Without auto tune we are communicating our natural gifts which we have honed through thousands of hours of practice.

For every one minute of our most perfect version of our music, these thousands of hours lay beneath the surface. We are not perfect. We have to work so hard to get a hundred miles near that state. In any case it seems to me that perfection may have its own kind of ugliness. What on earth is a really perfect sound? One that formed of a sine wave? A pure clear voice in cathedral? A characterful beguiling beauty? A wonderful top note from a richly toned diva? A raw pounding? Is perfection tranquil? Is it loud or soft? Is it ever to be found in low notes? Is it sung in German or in medieval French? Is it a lovely glossed up and auto tuned girl or boy singing a pop song that will be popular for two or three months? Is it in the fabulous Young at Heart? The Kings Singers? It is my dearest wish that we make live sounds with our voices, learn to tune into others and carry on developing as listeners.The world so needs listeners..
I hope you enjoy my selections..