Revisiting Performance Enhancing Tech

[StradivariusBone]

So prior to posting, I did some searching and found that it has been a minute since this topic has come up. Back in the 90's, Antares Autotune was a nascent technology and Cher's scandalous reveal of what could be considered a liberal artistic use of it was a topic of no lack of controversy. Fast forward to today.

In the wake of COVID, many of us have found niches in the streaming whirlwind. For me personally I have been involved with it both in the religious and school sector since that's where I work. For the church side of things I'm seeing a lot of noise being made about adding in various effects and tools. In the past 20 or so years, it seems that the digital audio world has made it such that the entry cost of using some pretty advanced audio effects tech has been lowered by a lot. The emphasis being placed on creating a quality livestream product has thrown into sharp relief that what sounds good live might struggle over livestream.

All this to say, it's a very different world than when this topic was last brought up on the booth (at least from what I could find in my search). So I'm wondering what the general attitude is towards using things that "enhance" the performance of your artists. I got a taste of it using StudioOne4 with Melodyne. With a click of the mouse, you can essentially cure a pitchy vocalist. I'm seeing a lot of the big church groups utilizing things like the Waves server to layer in effects as well as handle pitch correction and the like. It's kinda terrifying. I recently watched the Beauty and the Beast remake with some non-musical friends, and Belle's vocals were very heavily pitch-corrected. It was immediately apparent to my musical wife and myself, but our non-musician friends couldn't pick it out. I know it's commonplace in produced audio these days, but for live?

At what point does it become an ethics issue? Or is it even an ethics issue any longer? I come from the background of being a musician first, then a sound guy. My effects arsenal tends to hover around a few different reverbs, delays, maybe a chorus here and there, but I largely avoid adding too much lest the "sound" becomes less of the artists I mixing and more of me screwing around. I don't have problems with guitarists adding pedals to modify their tone (outside of the ubiquitous ground hum) But when it comes to pitch correction, I cringe.

Is this an outdated attitude in 2021?

 

[TimMc]

A friend of mine mixes the Latin Grammy Awards show. There were 8 "auto tune stations" set up for operation by live engineers, for various performers. Some, I'm told, were for specific FX, others were for correction of artist pitch inaccuracy.

As a formally trained musician, both voice and piano, I'm offended as I view these as *musical art* charades. Bogus, F'n imposters, poseurs, etc.

And then I think of *theatre* (or movies/TV) where any concept or vision of authenticity is, in fact, fully artificial, and for the audience, I get it. I don't like it, but I fully understand we're selling a show, an experience, and ultimately that's what matters. When I'm mixing for a HoW my 'show priorities' are a little different than working with a secular pop group, but it helps for me to think of TV-style production than "music recital".

Whether or not "god" needs a 10:30am full-on production show before the offering and sermon is a matter of individual taste and/or beliefs.

 

[MRW Lights]

oof... does that can of worms have an aroma to it. I'll likely fall on the side of agreeing with you which seems to happen more often than not. The trouble is... I think the "listener" has become accustomed to the manufactured sound from augmenters like AutoTune and various other pitch correctors that we no longer hear "real sound"

As an educator myself I tell my students that AutoTune is meant as a fix... as in it can only fix the electronics. It can't give you talent. Making it sound better doesn't mean it sounds good. Can it help? Sure. That's the point.

I think augmentation has overgrown it's use as a tool of confidence and masking, but that's just me who's spent too much time listening to hours of EQ tweaks and doing the best at my job to help others capture their craft in as real a way as possible.

 

[FMEng]

Back around 2014, Aretha Franklin released a new album that had some obvious autotune on it. There was such an uprising over it, that she went on Letterman and performed the song live, without augmentation, to prove she still had it. I hope the producer lost his or her job. The radio station I work at played the song for a short time. There were enough complaints that the music director pulled it. I don't know if the song was ever re-released without the autotune.

I guess it depends on the genre. With some music, heavy use in an artistic choice. In other genres, like jazz and classical, you'd be shot for just having the box in the control room. If I were a singer, I'd be embarrassed to have a crutch like that.

 

[MNicolai]

Like most things, if artists are using it as a a crutch, it's a problem because it hinders their ability to excel at the art including impeding their ability to riff in a recording studio or an acoustic setting where some of the best creativity happens. If they're using it as something transformative to achieve a certain sound, absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately, it's about the audience or fan experience. This isn't Julliard. Purity of talent and perfection of technique takes a back seat so long as the audience is happy. We've seen similar gatekeeping and hemming and hawing over the years ranging from electric guitars not being "real guitars" to the ProTools evolution, to Waves being directly integrated in almost all major live sound desks. If you're a music producer, your goal is produce the best music possible using any and all tools available to you. Things like autotune are no different. It only becomes a problem when you're trying to use it like bondo on a rusted car.

I certainly went through a phase myself of judging EDM artists for hopping up on stage and playing back carefully timecoded stems in Ableton -- but then I did a bunch of research into how much more goes into those productions and I have nothing but respect for those artists now. Technology can be a crutch or it can be a cudgel and every artist has to choose how they want to use it. I remember back in the 2010-11 era, there was a ton of grief around Skrillex for how synth'd his music was. Well, a friend of mine in his recording studio spent about 2 weeks trying to reverse engineer signal chains that produced that same signature sound and for the life of him couldn't replicate it. Just because there's tech involved doesn't been we need to hold our noses and be snobby about it when the artists are still knocking out record albums. And if you don't personally like that sound, then just don't listen to it. Like CGI visual effects though, you're probably exposed to it 100x more often than you think and only the absolute worst cases are the ones you actually notice and that stick out to you.

 

[StradivariusBone]

Whether or not "god" needs a 10:30am full-on production show before the offering and sermon is a matter of individual taste and/or beliefs.

doing the best at my job to help others capture their craft in as real a way as possible

With some music, heavy use in an artistic choice.

It only becomes a problem when you're trying to use it like bondo on a rusted car.

I think this captures the gist of my feelings. It's questionable when it's used in place of correcting musical errors. Vocalists are notorious for not being able to read music. The act of singing I think is much more challenging to relate to written notation just because it is so internal and endemic to our bodies. Whereas playing an instrument involves a physical and tactile experience, singing is 100% internal. That's not to say that singers can't learn to read music, but the best vocalists I've worked with often times will also play piano or guitar as well.

Anyway, that's to say, I think singing is something that is accessible to everyone since most everyone has a voice. The barrier to entry is much lower so it's easier for people to pick it up by rote. That's where you get these people that have decent talent at imitating the radio sound, but lack the ability to hear a pitch center.

I approach adding effects to a mix very carefully. If it's a musical, I'm doing it to add distance to the mics and ambiance. I want the microphone to disappear. If I'm doing it to an instrument in a rock band, I'm paying attention to what it sounds like without the PA. If they've stacked pedals in front of them and have a vintage cab and a head with tubes sticking out, I don't want to step on the sound they've created.

I dunno. I approach the craft with the idea that my job is to blend and unify the sound, building on what exists. A lot of these plugins and addons seem designed to create something on top of that, which if you're producing something then yeah I get it. But mixing for a church livestream? It seems like it's too much.

 

[jtweigandt]

As a singer, I don't like the idea of pitch correction, especially in live performance. You work hard, and or have talent that others do not, it just seems like cheating. Michael Jordan and I could have the same freethrow percentage if I used the freethrowmatic.
Then again... all broadway stars would still sound like Ethyl Merman if not for modern mics, mixers, and amps, likewise some musical numbers that have quiet and nuanced sections could never have been done on the stage in a large house.

 

[RonHebbard]

As a singer, I don't like the idea of pitch correction, especially in live performance. You work hard, and or have talent that others do not, it just seems like cheating. Michael Jordan and I could have the same freethrow percentage if I used the freethrowmatic.
Then again... all broadway stars would still sound like Ethyl Merman if not for modern mics, mixers, and amps, likewise some musical numbers that have quiet and nuanced sections could never have been done on the stage in a large house.

@jtweigandt when you posted "the freethrowmatic" I expected you to add "Trademarked" as @TimMc would've done.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard

 

[jtweigandt]

I may have referenced this before here.. but do yourself a favor if you're not a recording expert (or maybe if you are) and listen to this 6 part series
taking us from analog to digital recording and the ramifications. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ways-of-hearing/

 

[MNicolai]

I dunno. I approach the craft with the idea that my job is to blend and unify the sound, building on what exists. A lot of these plugins and addons seem designed to create something on top of that, which if you're producing something then yeah I get it. But mixing for a church livestream? It seems like it's too much.

These are completely different worlds. Theater mixing is generally very true and honest to the source. High profile live music mixing is effectively hiring a studio-grade mix engineer with live experience. Their job is specifically to replicate the sound of the album in a live environment, and they use *lots* of different Waves plugins for all kinds of different reasons from reproducing the sound of butter smooth Neve compressors to finding that perfect reverb or kick sound. They are basically recording engineers in the trenches of festival work. Autotune is a very small slice of what those plugins get used for. On the spectrum of worship, you have some congregations that are very traditional and would want that more honest reproduction, but then there are those modern and megachurch styles where more money was spent on the flash and thump of the band than on the rest of the church.

In any case, lot of different tastes out there so it's really hard to discredit one style just because it's not your own personal cup of tea. Mostly it depends on what your audience's expectations are and what sells tickets. And what sells tickets for some types of shows can be very off putting to people attending other kinds of shows and vise versa.

 

[jkowtko]

My two cents --

Wouldn't it depend on the "product" you are offering?

For a brand name performer who is known for the quality of their voice, I would think of autotune as cheating.

For other types of musical performances where the overall presentation is paramount and you don't want a poor vocalist to be a distraction, I would think of autotune as another potentially useful sound tool.

-- John

 

[MNicolai]

For a brand name performer who is known for the quality of their voice, I would think of autotune as cheating

The signature sound for any modern brand name pop (and most other genres) artist is going to be sculped and produced well beyond just pitch correction. If cheating is what you're concerned about, you've got an entire effects chain that needs to be bypassed if you want to be true to an individual's acoustic voice.

I would say it's more productive to debate whether or not an individual's voice feels overly produced for a specific album, musical style, or event rather to draw lines in the sand over specific processing techniques across the board.

This is the same debate that's been had over all forms of art, technology, and other trends since the dawn of time. Is that punk band legitimate or are they posers? Is a certain piece of art or artistic technique "real" art? Are there such things as bad words? Almost always those debates only exist at a certain moment in time and if you fast forward 50 years, those debates have evolved into some new frontier of gatekeeping and now the original debate that's come and gone seems silly -- everyone looks back and goes "It was all punk music" or "Of course that's art" and language evolves so the bad words of 50 years ago are pillow talk today and there's a whole new vocabulary of words to question if they're bad or not. The ethics of pitch correction or other plugins are going to follow that exact same trajectory.

 

[RonHebbard]

The 7 words you can't say on TV / The seven effects you can't use on classical music.
I'm seeing / hearing the parallels.
George Carlin was ahead of his time.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard

 

[TimMc]

Well, if y'all wanna put it like that....

There are hundreds of plug ins from Waves, Mc DSP, Avid, plenty of others. Only a small fraction of them are pitch correction plugs, although there are a bigger number that will alter pitch in ways that are not "correction." There a lots of dynamics plug ins (many sampled classic hardware boxes), lot of vintage and "designer" EQs, hybrid EQ/dynamics processors, harmonics/saturation/distortion emulations, and some clever multi-function plugs... and likely some I'm leaving out.

The difference between digital mixing is that digital IS accurate; it lacks all the tiny distortions and non-linear behavior of analog circuits, recording tape, and the record/reproduce heads. The plugs that create these various non-linear experiences are used specifically to make things "mo' analogue" than to be obvious, stand-out EFX. I also like the sound of a several vintage compressors, and I'd never be able to have ONE channel of Fairchild 660, but with plug ins, I can have one on every vocal. Same with reverbs - I can't afford, can't repair, and couldn't move an EMT plate reverb, but a plug in license takes up little space. And they sound luscious...

But mixing comes down to 3 things: it's a one-off, I'm mixing a band I've not worked with before so my goal is "first, do no harm" and let the songs and performance give me guidance as to how to mix (and any instructions I got from the band). If I'm mixing FOH for "an artiste", I've attended reheasals and likely the artist's manager is giving me notes to maintain the integrity of the presentation. If I'm mixing anything else, the question is "do I *produce* this performance or do I let the music guide me? In a HoW, there's a fine line between mixing for the music director/minister, and mixing for the congregation or oneself. Some of those in authority can have very specific ideas about how the performance is presented and are not shy about using spriitual blackmail.

 

[StradivariusBone]

The seven effects you can't use on classical music

A guy I knew in college was friends with one of the engineers that worked on a few Chicago Symphony Orchestra albums. He told me the amount of editing that goes into those albums is nothing short of what you might expect from the likes of Kanye West or Taylor Swift. Modern orchestral recording is a long way from two mics hung off the bridge.

I guess this is more about a conversation that needs to happen between sound op and musician. This post was inspired by the feeling that among the church tech groups I see that whoever uses the most toys "wins". Also, using that stuff as a crutch to help performers where they really need to just spend more time in the woodshed. It's unreal how easy it is to fix EVERYTHING about a vocal in melodyne. It's not even just pitch correction, you can reshape vowels and tone, completely altering a performance.

The other problem is the complexity added. It's already difficult to train a layperson volunteer to mix audio on a board that's being fed from Dante. To get that person to visualize the signal path to an effects rack and to be able to use that effectively? That's another taco entirely. The church I sidehustle for, I'm the only paid tech, so it's a tradeoff of simplicity vs. adding extra tools/effects/etc.

I think we've reached a point where the digital emulation of vintage effects is pretty darn close to the real deal, which is cool. I, like @TimMc love the fact that I can throw a compressor on every channel, or a gate or whatever. That I have the flexibility to tune each musician to that level and then save it so I can just pull it back up later. That's a fantastic part of the tech. And having this tech so accessible does allow us to push the boundaries of what is possible. An analogy would be Keith Emerson in front of a piano instead of the Radio Shack catalog. That dude was just straight talent and would find a way to push the confines of whatever instrument he was using.

 

[TheaterEd]

To riff on the topic. Attending a live show is just a better experience than listening to a recording. I feel like music albums used to be edited in order to make the recording feel more like the Live experience. . With all of the leaps and bounds that they have made in recording technology and in home audio reproduction, I think there has been a shift and that there is more and more pressure on artists to recreate their live performances to sound more like their recording. Their audience gets so used to hearing it one way, that hearing it live can be a let down if it is too different.

Then you get down to your 'typical' Sunday morning service performer and you have an audience expecting sound like they are used to hearing at home. Additionally, some of those Sunday morning audience members can be pretty vicious with their judgments when they think the big-guy isn't looking. I still remember leaving church as a kid and my Great-Uncle saying, "well, it was a good service, but he didn't say anything in an hour that he couldn't have said in 45 minutes". And those same people are the ones keeping the lights on with their tithes.

I don't see anything wrong with giving talented amatures a competitive edge in order to keep up with the pros. If this is your day job though, you better be cultivating the skills to pay the bills.

T-Pain is a huge user/abuser or auto-tune, but his acoustic set is incredible and he is great Live!

 

[FMEng]

Additionally, some of those Sunday morning audience members can be pretty vicious with their judgments when they think the big-guy isn't looking.

We don't have that problem with traditional hymns. Nobody knows what it sounded like when JS Bach played it.

 

[jtweigandt]

We don't have that problem with traditional hymns. Nobody knows what it sounded like when JS Bach played it.

A Mighty Fortress is our Board, it's sliders never flailing
Our Sound man steadfast through the flood, of mortal Trills prevailing

 

[StradivariusBone]

Punctuation is important.

Anyway, I was listening to Nirvana's "From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah" and getting some nostalgia on. I can recall being a kid and going to shows and the sound being so different than album and radio play. But the energy was different. It soon became apparent that some bands had a lot more stage presence and were just fun to watch. I got that vibe with Nirvana, I wasn't lucky enough to see them live, but they released Wishkah after Cobain's death and it is just so...raw. Their live sound is wholly different than what you get on stuff like Nevermind.

I'm mostly just trying to gauge what the vibe is right now with this kinda tech. I still think it's ok to be a little more exposed on live sound vs. produced content. I went to Sea World once and watched the Seymore and Clyde show. And everything went wrong. Wrong audio cues, wrong sight gags, none of the animals were cooperating, and literally everything that could go wrong without someone getting seriously injured (which is a testament to their crew since that show involved a decent bit of performer flying and a ton of working at height) went very wrong.

And it was a blast. The crew improvised, the cast rolled with it and I still remember that show years later. There's a reason it's live theatre. Or theater if you're into that whole American thing like @gafftaper

 

[RonHebbard]

View attachment 21585

Punctuation is important.

Anyway, I was listening to Nirvana's "From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah" and getting some nostalgia on. I can recall being a kid and going to shows and the sound being so different than album and radio play. But the energy was different. It soon became apparent that some bands had a lot more stage presence and were just fun to watch. I got that vibe with Nirvana, I wasn't lucky enough to see them live, but they released Wishkah after Cobain's death and it is just so...raw. Their live sound is wholly different than what you get on stuff like Nevermind.

I'm mostly just trying to gauge what the vibe is right now with this kinda tech. I still think it's ok to be a little more exposed on live sound vs. produced content. I went to Sea World once and watched the Seymore and Clyde show. And everything went wrong. Wrong audio cues, wrong sight gags, none of the animals were cooperating, and literally everything that could go wrong without someone getting seriously injured (which is a testament to their crew since that show involved a decent bit of performer flying and a ton of working at height) went very wrong.

And it was a blast. The crew improvised, the cast rolled with it and I still remember that show years later. There's a reason it's live theatre. Or theater if you're into that whole American thing like @gafftaper

@StradivariusBone As you said / typed / posted; punctuation is important: Let's eat grandma!
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard