6 Jul
2004
6 Jul
'04
4:26 p.m.
A great E-Mail.
I did some ProTool overdubs recently on tenor saxophone. When I asked
the producer/engineer if we could do another pass on a section as I felt
the high Eb was a little down, he stated that: "it was OK, we can fix
it with AutoTune." What bothered me was that there were notes that I
DID want a little detuning on, and that it was ALL out of my hands at
that point.
/mel
Professional Musician - Saxophone/Flute/Clarinet
Alastair Couper wrote:
The technology is interesting, to be sure. But what
does it say about
the state of artistry these days ? I recently read an interview with
David Crosby, decrying the rise of autotune plugins and the like. He
spent his energies on learning to sing on pitch. These days
performers don't need to sing at all, they just mouth tracks that
were autotuned in the studio. And another interview has James Brown
saying: don't use a drum machine, learn to play the drums. The best
music comes from the mastery of an instrument or vocal skill, not
from editing.
I have watched as I try various tools to bang my playing into shape,
and am finally deciding that this is the wrong way to go. Spitiual
death is around the corner. Live music is best. Music is meant to be
PLAYED after all, not worked. Or worked over.
A minority opinion from a nobody. Given the state of the "industry"
though, it's going to be like Photoshop for audio, where there is no
physical point of reference anymore, and anything can be morphed into
anything.