It recently occurred to me that many of the harshest critics of pitch-altering software like Melodyne and Auto-Tune are acting as better salespeople for those things than their marketing teams could ever have dreamt of. Even if we grant the absurd premise that digitally altering the pitch of a skilled singer’s performance is “pitch correction” (spoiler alert: it isn’t), pitch alteration can only alter one aspect of singing. Can you guess what it is?
It alters pitch.
Sorry, I worded that like a trick question. It’s right there in the name.
Pitch alteration doesn’t alter bad intonation. It doesn’t alter bad breath control. It doesn’t alter bad support. It doesn’t alter bad projection. It doesn’t alter bad diction. It doesn’t alter bad phrasing. It doesn’t alter bad rhythm. It only alters pitch.
(Granted, bad rhythm can also be digitally altered, but the end result of altering both may well feel too unnatural to be usable, and anyway, click tracks are to rhythm what pitch alteration is to singing.)
In short, a bad singer who has been pitch-altered is still a bad singer – and their performance will be less human, and therefore less emotional, and therefore worse. We should stop even accepting the premise that we’re discussing “pitch correction”. The correct pitch is the one the singer sang live. There is no other correct pitch.
Thus, when Britney Spears’ raw vocals for “Toxic” were leaked, no one should’ve been surprised that she did a good job – the fundamentals of good singing were all there, even if the song is clearly slightly outside her natural tessitura. The Auto-Tune on her voice was clearly mostly a stylistic choice. I’ve softened a bit on uses like this.
Another song where its use doesn’t bother me much is the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”, partly because the dude’s obviously got a phenomenal voice and great technique, partly because it’s only heavily employed on the chorus, and partly because it just kinda fits the song’s style (if it had been an actual ’80s song, they’d probably have used a vocoder for those parts).
(Aside: “Blinding Lights” finally led me to accept that Max Martin, who coproduced it and cowrote it, is a genius. Not all his work is to my taste, but he’s clearly one of the most skilled pop craftsmen to emerge since… Prince? The only pop songwriters I can think of since the ’80s who might be on the same level are Ren and T-Pain.)
But back to my point: people overestimate how much pitch alteration can do. You can’t just push a button and make bad singing into good singing. Even if someone’s pitch has been altered, you can tell if their original vocals were any good based on whether the other fundamentals of singing are there. Is their breath control good? Does their voice have power where it needs it? Are they smart with their vowel manipulation? And so on. If they’ve mastered all these things, then we can be reasonably certain the pitch alteration was either a stylistic choice, or just a producer being too lazy to disable it.
To be clear, I strongly dislike pitch alteration overall. Any good singer will, whether consciously or not, intentionally go flat or sharp for emotional effect, and pitch alteration therefore removes emotion from singing. I especially hate to hear it applied after-the-fact to live performances – the whole point of live performances is supposed to be that they’re raw and unfiltered! I will never warm to it as a whole, and I think its existence has done overall far more harm than good to popular music. However, many of its harshest critics frequently overhype its power. Bad singing is bad singing, whether its pitch has been altered or not.
—Aaron Freed
Tallahassee, FL
2025-07-24 (rev. 2025-07-27)