Originally Posted By: JohnJohnJohn
Originally Posted By: bobcflatpicker
even though I'm a mediocre singer, I wouldn't use AT to make my vocals sound better than they actually are.

just curious if you also eschew EQ and de-essers? or anything else an engineer might typically use to improve a vocal track? would double-tracking a vocal also be "cheating"?


I'd say: "That depends." Mankind always lived in a world where people sought to enhance deficiencies. The electric piano weighs less than a real one, an electric guitar can compete with horns while a classical guitar remains unheard in the sound carpet of a big band. Any weapon was created to enhance the strength of the user in a certain field of performance.

I use EQ at my most of performances to lower the volume of certain frequencies of the backing track that compete with my voice for the same space. In this case I call square dances and the dancers need to comprehend what I call to be able to dance that call.

If I'd use EQ to make my voice more pleasant, I probably would cheat, because at a campfire situation without any electronic help, it would stick out like said sore thumb.

De-Essers (and EQ) are often used to correct recording mistakes or deficencies of equipment. This is not cheating. If your voice is that way that sibilants are a lot louder than the rest, it is cheating.

For me cheating is something you do to hide inabilities. Everybody knows that recordings are usually not done in echo-prone mountain valleys, so echo is an effect that cheats and everybody knows. (There are recordings with echo that musicians were able to copy, just to find out that on the recording there was an echo machine employed. They felt cheated.) Artificial reverberation wets the tone, it is done in studios and live to simulate a certain room condition that creates exactly the sound I want.

In (almost) any case techology that eliminates the technical flaws of employed equipment and room characteristics is not cheating. Any technology that impresses the uninformed public with features that cannot reproduced without the technology (by that person!) is, imho, in the same category of cheating like Bob Norton's example of using performance enhancement drugs.

If I can sing and hit all the notes of a song when doing it live, but my voice experiences a mood swing in the studio AT is not cheating. It is a time and money saver. If I happen to play one note sharp or flat at a recording session, I could just record that part again and splice it into the recording -- or I could use Melodyne. Cheating is, if I play all the notes of a song and then create the Flight of the Bumble Bee with my DAW.

For me: If I can do it without the technology using technology in certain situations is not cheating. If "I" can't reproduce it (but somebody else could) without using technological performance enhancement features it is cheating.

Last edited by GHinCH; 10/19/14 02:13 AM.
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