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.
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? Ren, Ejae, and T-Pain are the only others I can think of since the ’80s who might be on the same level.)
In fact, 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.
It follows, then, that it is impossible to correct the pitch of a recording whose speed was correctly calibrated. An example of such a miscalibration on a well-known recording is Led Zeppelin’s “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”. It’s meant to use the same key as “Heartbreaker”, which leads directly into it, but it’s about a quarter-tone flat. I wince every single time I hear it. That’s the sort of pitch correction I’d welcome. However, while that sort of recording speed miscalibration was commonplace on analog recordings, it’s so difficult to do with digital technology that no professional engineer would ever do it by accident.
Auto-Tune and Melodyne don’t correct anything. They alter or quantize. Anyone skilled enough at singing to make a living as a professional vocalist knows full well, either consciously or subconsciously, how to intensify their emotional effect on listeners by going microtonally sharp or flat at the right times. Altering artistic decisions like that at such a fundamental level removes those emotions and the overall warmth and humanity of their singing. It’s an incomprehensibly insulting practice, and I’m genuinely shocked that there isn’t more of an outcry about it.
People overestimate how much pitch alteration does. You can’t just push a button and turn Florence Foster Jenkins into Floor Jansen. 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 despise pitch alteration. 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 anything other than an occasional stylistic flavor, 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. 2025-09-06)
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Admit it: You expected his name to come up in this rant, but you didn’t expect it to come up in that context. T-Pain doesn’t deserve the blame for Auto-Tune. He didn’t introduce its usage. He didn’t even popularize it. The first popular recording to use it was Cher’s “Believe” (1998). T-Pain released his first single in 2005. I mentioned that “Toxic” was auto-tuned; that was first released on In the Zone in 2003. It was already ubiquitous by the time he started releasing music. Also, dude’s got pipes. No less a source than Ozzy Osbourne called his “War Pigs” cover “the greatest ‘War Pigs’ cover ever”. The whole On Top of the Covers album is fantastic, he won the first season of The Masked Singer, and his NPR Tiny Desk Concert is already the stuff of legend. T-Pain is one of the few musicians who’s used Auto-Tune in a way I find acceptable, since he knows how to sing and isn’t using it to cover up defects in his singing; he’s using it purely for stylistic reasons, like vocoders were used in the ’80s. It helps that he’s also an extremely gifted producer who knows what sort of sounds work well together. To the extent that anyone did copy him, most didn’t understand why it worked for him. But that’s not his fault. |
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