The Evolution of Auto-Tune: From Edgy Gimmick to Established Cliché
A brief look into the origins of the wildly popular vocal effect.
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We look at the evolution of Auto-Tune, a distinctive vocal effect that has shaped the sound of modern pop music for the past two decades.
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Love it or hate it, there’s simply no escaping the unmistakable sound of Auto-Tune, the vocal effect that has been used subtly, relentlessly, and everywhere in between over the past twenty years.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune
The way Auto-Tune is used in music production today, it’s become part of the furniture. In fact, there isn’t a professional producer, engineer, or studio that doesn’t have it in some form or another.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune: The Origins
Believe it or not, Auto-Tune’s origin story actually began in the oil industry. While working as a research engineer at Exxon, Antares founder Dr. Andy Hildebrand initially used the technology in the search for oil deposits by interpreting sonar data. When a colleague joked about needing a special device to sing in tune, Hildebrand got the idea to use his algorithms for pitch correction.
Hildebrand started Antares Audio Technologies in 1989, but it took nearly a decade before Auto-Tune was released onto the market in 1997. The idea behind the software was for it to be used a “behind-the-scenes” post-production processor to help producers and engineers do minor pitch correction on vocal recordings.
It wouldn’t take long before Auto-Tune would start appearing in popular music, with songs like Cher’s “Believe” (1998) and “Naive Song” (2000) by Mirwais showcasing the futurist, android-like tone of the vocal effect. The timing couldn’t be better, as vocal gimmicks were a becoming increasingly popular, especially in dance-centric hits from groups like Eiffel 65.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune: Using Auto-Tune
At first, Auto-Tune was implemented almost accidentally like many great studio effects, When “Believe” producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling began experimenting with the Retune Speed control, they found something magical occurred when it was set to zero. We know that Auto-Tune corrects the pitch of a signal in real-time, but the additional parameters affect how the algorithm interacts with the sound.
By setting the retune speed to the fastest setting (zero), you completely avoid emulating the natural glide a vocalist has between notes, as well as the slight variations that happen when holding notes. Instead, you enter what is known today as “T-Pain mode” where the pitch moves instantaneously between notes, and the tone becomes almost synthesized as a result.
If you think there is no creativity involved in this process, you’d be wrong, because this is just where the fun begins. Auto-Tune allows you to set the key and scale you’re working in, like A Minor for example. However, where things start getting interesting is when you start removing certain notes from the scale so the vocal gets tuned to a certain chord.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune: Now, Anyone Can Sing?
As you start to understand Auto-Tune as more of a creative production instrument rather than just a gimmick, you’ll quickly start dispelling a few myths about the software. The biggest misconception about Auto-Tune by far is that it makes you a better performer or somehow bestows a musical gift upon your voice.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, and the artists who use Auto-Tune the most are living proof. With or without the help of Auto-Tune, artists like T-Pain, Kanye West, and Future are still great performers in their own right. They have simply harnessed the effect and made it a part of their respective artistic identities.
Naturally, with any musical trend, there are innovators and imitators. That’s why it’s important not to paint all artists who use Auto-Tune with the same brush. Instead, we can differentiate by learning about the ones who ushered in an era, before almost every song on the charts was laced with Auto-Tune.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune: The Auto-Tune Pioneer
Today, Faheem Rashad Najm aka T-Pain is widely regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Auto-Tune. However, his journey to finding the sound in the first place was not the most straightforward. As a young artist looking for a way to differentiate himself in the marketplace, T-Pain was exposed to the sound of Auto-Tune in a song that immediately caught his ear.
However, there was one obstacle in his way. He didn’t actually know it was Auto-Tune at first. In the early to mid-2000s, the culture surrounding music production technology was not quite as well publicized as it is today. As a result, T-Pain was stuck trawling through hundreds upon hundreds of demos and pirated plugins, searching for the mysterious vocal effect he had heard.
Well, eventually he found it, and after unsuccessfully trying to sell one of his songs to Akon, his solo career began to blossom and the rest is history. The formula of Auto-Tune and understated RnB chords proved to be magical, and the song, Bartender, in fact, was the hit that led to Akon signing T-Pain to his label in 2007.
The Evolution of Auto-Tune: Auto-Tune Today
As a new artist in today’s musical landscape, you don’t have to go through the same T-Pain-staking lengths to get your hands on the Auto-Tune effect. Virtually every DAW system on the market comes standard with a form of pitch correction that you can use to access a similar sound.
By now, the sound of Auto-Tune is about as unexpected in Pop and Hip-Hop music as a guitar in a rock song, so you’d have to really dig deep to find a new context or a new approach to using the effect creatively. Like any sound that has reached mainstream popularity and subsided again, it’s hard to use it without conjuring up associations with the endless number of past songs that were part of the Auto-Tune era.
However, the digital crystalline character of the Auto-Tune sound has its roots in the West Coast funk of the 1980s. As long as artists and producers keep recreating and recontextualizing the sounds of eras past, there will always be a chance for us to be inspired by Auto-Tune one more time.
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