PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Seduced By Perfect Pitch

To me that's an entirely different thing. People using backing tracks are obviously using backing tracks and enhancing them with vocals or instrumentals.

The lead part, whether it is vocal or instrumental is the focus of what the audience hears, and with automated backgrounds, at least the focus of the product is real.

It's like a person hiring a background band - but with today's economics performers in small venues just don't get paid enough money to hire a band. And for example, in the small rooms our duo plays in, they would never hire a large band, and they wouldn't fit anyway, so we aren't putting people out of work.

So we have our backing tracks (which I create myself), we both sing, I play sax, wind synth, flute, guitar, and sometimes keys, and Leilani plays guitar and synth. We are performing skills over a track we created (sometimes with the help of BiaB).

But as I said, the main part of the product, the focus, the most important part is real.

"Singers" using auto-tune are not performing any skill at all, not even singing. They are pretending to sing, and the vocals are the focus.

It's like going into a restaurant, ordering grouper, and getting tile fish or snapper.

It's also like when Martha Wash (of The Weather Girls and Two Tons Of Fun) sang the lead to CC Music Factory, Black Box and probably a few other groups. The sexy model danced around on stage while the prerecorded Martha Wash voice came out of the speakers - Milly Vanilly like.

Martha is quite obese but a great singer. So they have some sexy model/dancer pretending to be a singer - to me that's fraud.

And she got cheated out of being credited and the royalties from the record "Gonna Make You Sweat Now" - sued - and created a landmark decision.



Taylor Swift is a talented songwriter but she isn't a good singer by any stretch of the imagination.

She needs auto-tune - therefore she isn't a singer - period.

Let her ditch the auto-tune and sing badly Bob Dylan style and I'll show her some respect. Until then, I feel she should write songs and let real singers sing them. That would do even more justice to her creations.

My duo partner Leilani is a great singer and a great entertainer, and can sing rings around any of those auto-tune frauds. In my life I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of talented singers. I've heard them practice long tones to stay on pitch, expressive nuances to ornament their music, and listen intently to study what the great singers do and how to do it. I hear Taylor, Miley, Ke$ha and so many others "sing" and it just turns me off.

And many of them are like the stand-ins for Martha - pretty faces and bodies doing an erotic dance while pretending to sing.

Oh I too like a pretty girl and like to admire her body. But what we have here are soft-core p0rn stars using the term 'singer' to legitimize their act.

And I have nothing against p0rn stars, they needs no legitimizing to me. I like to see unclothed and semi-clothed women, but lets call a p0rn star a p0rn star, not a singer.

90db mentioned photo shop.

When the supermarket tabloid takes a picture of some starlet and splices in a picture of a young star that they never went out with and prints a story about their hot new romance - that's the equivalent of auto-tune - a fraud.

When a cable news station takes the speech of the president, slices it, dices it, and rearranges it so that he appears to be saying the exact opposite of what he really said, that's the equivalent of auto-tune - a fraud.

I know it's not going to stop, and it isn't going away any time soon, but I don't like the sound of auto-tune artifacts, I don't like the abruptness of pitch changing, and I don't like to hear someone who can't carry a tune pretend to be a singer.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it

Insights, incites and minor rants by Notes