@@ThundermansThunder Yeah I agree but there are masses of people who buy and eat up the counterfeit, so artistic crime pays off, especially for those who don't have much inborn creativity and personal touch.
@@YtuserSumone-rl6sw Unfortunately, what you say is true, which explains why the industry is overrun with mediocre commonness, as opposed to the unique musical and vocal creativity that should be available. The worst part of it is that the public condones this behavior with high praise, to remain "relevant" among their peers, and financially, when they buy the music and the tickets to attend concerts and other functions, not necessarily because they actually enjoy the music. It's just so bizarre!
The Evolution of sound ideals is interesting....like the Holodeck in Star Wars....we live in the internet era..everyone seems to have a virtual alter ego ( ideal version of yourself)
When I was a kid, if I used "But everybody's doing it," as an argument, my mother would ask me: "If everybody was jumping off bridge, would you go, too?" Just because "everybody" is doing it is not a good reason. As a voice teacher, I would never tell a student to use autotune or pitch correction. This was an important one. Thank you, Fil!
I am always so impressed by how careful and courteous you are in these videos. You are clearly not about talking down others, and you are clearly not pitching. You are what a teacher is meant to be. And, I (we) are grateful for you!
As an audio engineer that was around when everyone started to use melodyne on everything I can tell you that by far the main (and often the only) reason was and is vastly reduced costs for the production and labels. Before melodyne you would have way longer recording sessions with the singers hunting for that perfect take or figuring out which takes can be edited together nicely. So you have to pay the artist, producer, engineers as well as (precious) studio time. With melodyne you only hunt for the take with the right inflection and feel and keep going even if a couple of notes are a bit off. And afterwards you only pay one guy on his home computer to do the melodyne. So once again good old greed gets us to this sad place we are in now.
100% Bang on. People went from being willing to pay $20 for an album to refusing to pay more than $0.033 Cents for a single listen of a single song. So the music industry had to go from paying up to $250,000 per album recording, to $250 per song recording. I'll never forget the day that kids were burning Metallica albums in the streets, because that was the day I knew it was over for quality music.
But in those cases, it would be understandable to me to pitch-correct a couple notes/phrases in a take. That wouldn't take the life out of the recording. But making every note 'perfect' does risk making it sound phony, with no 'feel'.
@@kcutoob I totally agree. But you have to understand that correcting just a couple of missed phrases takes a lot of more work because as an engineer you have to listen to the vocal track phrase by phrase, syllable by syllable, correct, listen again, correct, etc. If you just go over it and flatten everything out, you can do most things by eye which takes exponentially less time aka money and can be more easily done by an engineer that never heard the song before and was not part of the recording team (and is often cheaper on an hourly basis). So everything boils down to the money again.
I'm a professional singer, and I HATE pitch correction! I've had to wean my producer to stop using it on my voice because it just sounds better. Am I perfect all the time? No! But the performance is better not using it. We save both a lot of time not using it. When he puts a standard "auto-tuner" pitch correction on my voice, it actually makes my voice MORE pitchy not better. He then would have to go in and namely pitch correct each individual line! Now he doesn't have to do that since I got him to stop putting the standard overlay on my voice. He started to only "correct" a few spots. And it's more now for scratch vocals at this point. I pride myself on being pitch accurate without computer help.
One of the musicians my brother plays with puts a little NO AUTOTUNE logo on all his projects. My brother himself hates it too. So do all the other musicians I know. And so would I were I a musician myself! (Actually I do anyway...)
@@myopicautisticmetal9035Young people think it's cool to be a crummy singer and technology can make them a star and no one will care and they can achieve fame. I guess it does work if you have the proper look and fit into what is considered a money making artist/group. I guess it's up to the audience to demand real quality and see what's going on. I imagine it's quite tempting and frustrating at the same time for those who have the dream of being a successful singer.
@@heaven7360 True, they see it work for someone like Cher, for example, and assume that all bad singers will be accepted in the same manner and experience the same level of success. The reality is that, no matter what distractions she offers, she will always sound like a braying donkey with a vibrato reminiscent of a bleating goat, regardless. Like many other similar celebrities, she is very good at self promotion and diverting attention from her shortcomings, which is her true talent, as it enables her to convince her audience to treat her as a celebrity, despite her lack of talent, but her relentless persistence paid off. In this way, she has truly paved the way for those pop stars in her wake to promote themselves in like manner to their own successes, despite their lack of talent, when they are willing to invest the time and effort, and if they are noticed and helped by the right people, as was she. It is amazing how young people can so naively accept this pretense as authenticity!
“Our ears have come to expect perfect pitch when it comes to music” that’s not true. Most average music listeners can not hear if a not is slightly out of tune. I appreciate this channel standing up for real voices.
Very true. I'm genetically not very musical, but my mom made sure I learned to sing. I sang in a choir for years, so I'm trained. All that to say: I'm decent, but not great. But normal people consistently tell me I'm a great singer. They can't tell the difference.
@@k.h.6991 exactly, I think a lot of people are listening for tone and emotion. I personally try to sing without autotune. I think in most cases it sounds better. Doing it this way takes way more time, but the results are sonically better in my opinion.
I agree with you. I just watched your videos on Judy Garland / Kelly Clarkson and then happened to watch you analyze Elvis’s voice. He wasn’t pitch corrected and has one of the greatest voices of all time as is Judy Garland. They are SINGERS. They don’t need perfection. Elvis is so emotive when he sings, one can find themselves deeply affected & I hope we keep singers from years ago and just leave them alone. I hope I never see these singers corrected or auto tuned. We would really miss out on their greatness. Keep on informing and teaching us. 👍🏻😁😁🌹🌹🙋🏼♀️🙋🏼♀️
Pitch correction allows the "music" industry to promote a lot of semi-talented singers almost solely on the basis of their looks, their costuming and their projected persona. Of course, it wants to make pitch correction the industry standard.
That coach is doing her listeners a great disservice by encouraging the use of pitch correction as the default. Thanks for continuing to push back, Fil.
An addendum to this. Once pitch correction is "standard" synthetic voices will be easier to sell. What's cheaper than cheap talent? No human hires at all.
Everything now is becoming fake. Fake nails, fake hair, fake eyelashes. Fake bodies etc... we are accepting and expecting perfections that really do not exist. Give me real every day, imperfect as it is. I want real, creative, and emotional art. EDIT for spelling error.
Kind of like plastic surgery. More often than not, the person comes out looking worse than before and some people just don't even look like their former self. However, no matter what people do in terms of appearances, nothing is going to change the date on their birth certificate. Pitch correction is like musical plastic surgery. Take it away and you have the person's real voice and there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe my analogy is a bit in left field, but there you have it.
Its a shame, that the ears of the "regular music consumer" are now only used to pitch correction. Bring back imperfection!! Im a big fan of 60s music and the imperfection of the big hits of that time is part of the magic.
I think you explained pitch correction perfectly, humans aren't perfect, but it's that human element that makes a singer a unique individual and potentially so listenable !
Back in the mid 80s there were a bunch of charity songs put out by "supergroups" fundraising for the famine in Ethiopia. ("Do They Know It's Christmas" and "We Are the World") In Canada, Northern Lights was the celebrity group that did "Tears Are Not Enough". Producer David Foster did several takes of Neil Young, saying, "You're a bit flat, let's do it again," each time. Finally, Neil said to him, "Hey man, that's my sound." Can you imagine doing pitch correction on Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell?
I grew up with the greats: Frank Sinatra, Linda Rhondstadt, John Denver, Kenny Loggins, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond, Karen Carpenter, Aretha Franklin, Marilyn McCoo, (I keep remembering GREAT voices), and on and on. You completely nailed it with this video. I am not a musician or even really an "audiophile." but everybody, today sounds alike! You are spot on with you naming of "expression." As I have said in other comments on your channel, it is not simply "hitting the note" it is about the "artistic flourishes" around the notes. If it was just "hitting the note" a low grade AI would put all singers out of business. I HOPE today's "vocal artists" recognize this.
I was recently wondering what would happen if they applied it to Ella Fitzgerald. In her jazz-influenced way, she often hits and slides around notes in ways where you can't quite place what the note is supposed to be ... but it WORKS. It's what makes her brilliant, playing with those in-between microtones.
I also just remembered Paul McCartney talking about a typical John Lennon stylistic touch, relating it to the song "A Hard Day's Night". Paul said they always had a hard time trying to put out sheet music for that because on the first line -- "It's been a hard day's night ... and I've been work-ING like a dog" -- the second syllable of "working" is so bluesy that it's not actually a real note that can be played on a piano. The way John sings it, it's between two notes, and it just sounds wrong if you sing it as the note on either side. What would happen if they pitch-"corrected" the way John sang those purposely flattened bluesy notes?
I'm convinced the Celine vocal at the Olympics was AI taken from her old recordings. It's just too clean considering the physical struggles she's reportedly going through. They did it with Randy Travis ...they could do it with her.
@@bloozedaddy yeah I've seen a video of her struggling to sing. It was sad. From that to the Olympics performance, either it's a miracle or music industry "magic".
Just throwing this out there, but thank God this stuff wasn't around "back in the day", whenever that "day" is for you. Chrissie Hynde with the Pretenders comes to mind, she's bobbing and weaving around the pitch in a lot of songs and its freaking beautiful (middle part of "Kid" comes to mind). Thanks for a GREAT video explaining/analyzing all this stuff.
Don’t get bullied Fil. You are honest, know the technology and the pitfalls, you cerebrally explain the facts and the workings of all of this to people (like me for one) who never knew. You have opened up my ears!
To extend the make-up analogy, we've all seen people with make-up applied so heavily that they appear unnatural and off-putting. Pitch correction is like make-up applied to the human voice and like make-up, it hides what is natural, even when a natural voice - flaws and all - sounds more pleasing to the ear. Thank you again Fil for taking the time and effort to highlight and explain this issue that is so important to artists and listeners alike.
@paulm749 It perverts the listener's standard for flawlessness. I'm thinking of The Winner Takes It All - the imperfections in it are perfect and help make it a deeply moving song. If they had pitch-corrected them out, the song wouldn't be the winner that it is.
Fil @ 09:35 You just described what Elvis' said VERBATIM in his Aloha to Hawaii interview. He says what he loves & missed about performing live in concert with a big band and the audience. He says its a Live conversation, a give and take, all feeding each other. I often think back to that. As a Non-musician I always assumed he meant just the immediate response, the feedback from the crowd. He was excited for the entire world to all feel, see & hear the collective energy of the band, orchestra and him all feeding off one another - Conversing with each other. ❤
When you pitch correct a vocal you suck the soul out of it. The reason why great singers touch something deep within us is not because they have perfect pich, its because they are able to communicate their soul to ours. Neil Young is by no strech of the imagination a technically good vocalist but he knows how to sing from his soul and we feel it. The intent behind what we do is everything.
The person in the video is comparing pitch correction to putting on lip gloss. Lip gloss is not "changing" your lips, it is just enhancing the natural look of your lips. A better comparison to pitch correction is when you go to a doctor and get lip filler injected to change the natural shape of your lips.
Can you imagine pitch correcting Frank Sinatra? He was the king of vocal nuance and emotive expression. You can't replace that kind of talent with technology.
The thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if future releases do the same way as Fil has shown they've been pitch correcting the Eagles.(!) on new "remasters."
@@VideoArchiveGuythere’s an iTunes Sinatra purchase of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” where they cut off the first syllable of “She’s a fool and don’t I know it…”. Now it’s “He’s a fool and don’t I know it…”. Ffs. How could they miss that?Probably while trying to apply something they learned in music/sound school about hiss or sibilance.
Come to think of it, I'm gonna search if anyone's done "digicorrected" versions of Bob Dylan. That'd be hilarious and probably sucking out all life from it 😂
“Everybody is doing it” is the kind of argument a child makes to their parents to explain why they did something incredibly stupid. And the parents respond “if everyone jumped off a cliff would you follow them?“
My favourite middle school teacher asked me something like that..."would you just jump out of a plane?" My answer was "sure, if it was parked..." Mr Sutherland got a kick out of that.
Not sure if you were thinking it but didn't want to say it: Pitch correction was (in part) the master plan of the industry to get rid of just normally looking and ugly musicians. Now every singer looks like a model or a movie star, so it's quite easier to market them. I grew up in the 80's and I enjoyed a fair share of REALLY talented, but not especially good-looking bands and singers. Milli Vanilli was just a warning... They didn't have the technology, but now they do!
I don’t care if musicians are not pretty looking. I can’t see them through my stereo. I don’t go to concerts to look at the musicians. I go to hear them live. If they happen to look attractive, I don’t care. A balding, gap toothed pianist inspired me to learn how to play.
Bands were judged by their appearance in the 80s, too. Especially the women. The industry has always been shallow. Some men were allowed to be unattractive if they were already talented, but they weren't pop singers. And women always had to also be pretty.
@@sagittated You certainly have a point, but even for female musicians, there were more opportunities back then. Some examples (from my very subjective perspective) are the singer from The Pretenders (Chrissie Hynde), Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, Patty Smyth, etc. Yes, it's difficult to remember just a plainly ugly female singer, but I think that if a singer was truly good, she had at least a shot at success.
Have her listen to music of the 70's (golden area of recording), and even the 50-60's, and try to convince us that artists today (with auto correction/tuning) are better than earlier artists.
I love that the process is so well explained, I come from an era where we had no pitch correction, I don't personally like it, I prefer the anomalies of the human voice...in saying that I like being informed
Maybe. But your era saw many technical applications to achieve something as close to perfection as possible. The obvious is EQ, compression, de-essing, mic selection, reverb, etc. We are rarely hearing anything as close to a raw unaltered performance as we may think we are. Even back in the day.
@@JohnLnycI understand what you're saying although one thing I'll say is that there was never the discrepancy between live performance,s and recordings that you have now. We used to see a lot of live performances in the 70's - 80's, you knew what you were going to get. I recall seeing the Stones around '72 and it exactly what you expected.
@@Spo-Dee-O-Dee Yes. Tape was slowed or sped up. Tedious. When digital recording came around it solved a lot of problems. It also brought unintended consequences. Few people realize what has gone into the records they like. In a way, pitch correction is only a part of a much larger discussion.
You are absolutely on target, Fil, with everything you're saying! Music is being dehumanized by these so-called "enhancements"! Thank you for all your excellent work, brother!
10:18 "I'm going to have to explain microtones." sigh "I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want this video to go on for years". 😂I'm so glad I found this channel as it's not only educational but you are funny.
Fil, I'm in stitches watching you trying to keep a straight face, when she is saying that pitch correction is an enhancement and she uses it all the time🤣
I think I recognized the reactor and I am very disappointed. On the other hand, I do have a trunkload of Gucchhi handbags that I would like to offer her for sale.
I think she’ll do well churning out pop until an AI obsoletes her and produces perfect pitch from a program. I like singers who can sing, and don’t expect perfection, I expect expression.
This woman seems to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of music. It is not a product that needs to meet "industry standards", it is art. Also, I think we need to stop using the term "pitch correction" as that implicitly perpetuates the mindset of this woman and others like her. The pitches are not being "corrected" - there was nothing wrong with them - they are being adjusted. "Pitch adjustment" software is a more accurate term.
I've been saying it should be called 'pitch-altered' or 'pitch-automated' but yours is good too. People hear words like 'corrected' or 'tuned' believe it's an improvement and was 'incorrect' or 'out of tune' to start with.
You're spot on. When I've recorded songs, I refuse to mess about with it, for all the above reasons, but also, the small intonations and blips are often the emotion and heart in the piece. I'm unlikely to ever "make it big", but when I play and sing for people, they get to connect, and that is a huge reason for any art. Also, it means that if I'm asked to sing something, I don't have to worry about "not sounding like the recorded me"!
Great singers know, either through learning or instinctively, that you can enhance vocals by these ways. When you sing slightly sharp, you add tension and intensity to the vocal. When you sing slightly flat, you give a more relaxed vocal. When you sing slightly ahead of the note you add a hurry up let's go, anticipation to the vocal. When you sing slightly behind the note you give a more reflective and contemplative vocal
"Everyone's doing it..." Ah, no. I know a famous professional singer with 3 Grammy Awards on her shelf. (She's a friend of a friend.) It would be a scandal if she used pitch correction because she sings opera. She has sung at the Met in NYC and La Scala in Milan, Italy. She survives purely on her talent. No tricks or gimmicks. Either you can sing or they will throw eggs and tomatoes at you. 😅😅
Not all newer artists are using it. I follow a fair few (genuinely) independent 'pop' (for lack of a better term!), jazz and folk artists who would only use it for effect if at all. There are wonderful artists out there making great, authentic music - you just need to look outside of mainstream pop to find them ❤😊
Fil this afternoon I nodded off listening to you, NOT cos you’re boring but your voice is so calming and relaxing! Watched vid again after a cup of coffee lol. You’re a great teacher, thanks for your insights.
You speak out of my heart❤I am a singer for more than 20 years and will never ever use pitch correction.!!!I am a contralto and proud of how unique my voice is😊
Thank you, Fil! It's worth noting that orchestral strings are notorious for going out of tune if you look at them wrong. They are sensitive to temperature and humidity changes, and will change their shape in response because they're made of wood. Someone singing with an orchestra MUST be agile enough to meet the strings where they are at that moment, not where the "correct" pitch is. As an example, the auto-tuned Conan performance of Disturbed's Sound of Silence cover. In the last few notes, David Draiman sounds flat on the auto-tuned A4 because the orchestra is slightly sharp as their instruments have swelled up a tiny bit from the heat of the stage and the humidity from the audience. I bet he went just a touch sharp on that note to match the strings and the computer brought it down to "the correct pitch", so now he sounds flat on the note instead.
Part of the problem with pitch in an orchestra is that as a room full of musicians (and perhaps an audience) warms up, the strings go flat and the winds go sharp.
Years ago I sang with a cathedral choir, and we did a lot of unaccompanied music (because the old organ, since replaced, was pretty dreadful). One of the altos had perfect pitch, and there were plenty of times when she'd sound sharp because the rest of the choir had gone just a shade flat, but in pitch with each other, and there she was, at the original pitch.
You are doing a great job, I think my appreciation of the art of vocals has increased since watching your videos. Your knowledge of all things music is very helpful when trying to dissect what has happened to music. Thank you for the great content.
Melodyne and similar tools are VERY TRANSPARENT. You can make pitch changes that don't affect the vibrato. You'd be hard pressed to notice the effect... If you use extreme correction you can hear artifacts.
This pitch correction reminds me of an issue I had as a drummer once. I had a similar thing happen with a recording engineer and the snare drum on my drum set. Similar to the "micro tones" thing. Just like the recording of a singer without pitch correction, when a drummer is playing a beat there is that "human element" or "micro tones" present in the recording. The drummer is playing by feel from within and as a result the drummer doesn't always hit the drums with the same feel or intensity every time. This is what happened, after my drum track was recorded. The engineer sampled the first strike on the snare drum and then replaced all other snare drum strikes with the sampled one. As a result every snare drum strike in the songs sounded exactly the same and everyone was lined up exactly on the beat. This removed the human element and "personality" of my playing on the drum track. basically turned it into a drum machine. It's interesting to note that this person is not a musician himself.
Great video! You have nailed my biggest criticism of society at large! Integrity is becoming unpopular and not lucrative; however your existence offers hope!
No it’s not an “enhancement”… it is “correction” a tool to achieve “aural perfection”…as defined by some or all of the people involved in the recording and/or final product. It can be over used or used incorrectly. I think Fil has opened the door to the almost cavalier use of it. “Slapped” on a recording as an afterthought or a cost savings move. She does reveal wittingly or unwittingly it is an “industry standard” Fil’s take on this is excellent and eye (ear?) opening. Standard for Pop maybe. Too many productions involve over production. Voices are over manipulated. Not just pitch correction but over comped…I watched a video of a very good singer who was thrilled her vocal was comped…100 times in one song. There’s EQ. Some vocals are a bit too, in your face and massaged to the extreme. Ballads or slower pieces are loaded with heavy breathiness as an ear catching gimmick to add gravity…adding pretension to a performance. In short, it’s not adding “lipstick” it’s a full on makeover!
@@danwarb1Not necessarily! If we are going to celebrate imperfection, then any number of pitch corrected performances are likely those uncorrected performances we claim to admire. The troubling part of this is the indiscriminate use which effectively “masks” the un doctored performance. The point being in most cases we really don’t know what that unaltered performance was.
Appreciate your integrity. Thanks~ Too add something, the young person speaking is a child of pop culture, she's been programmed to think as she does... a justification of "it's what people expect" goes to show how insidious the programming is. Does she not see the perfection of nature. It is a sad state of affairs!
I believe you and am so grateful that I came upon your channel. Keep up the good work for music art sake. I have already gone into my favourite singer's channel and wrote a comment about modern technology regarding auto tune and pitch correction. I asked that it not be used. Who knows if he will ever read my comment but it is there. Thank you again for all I learn from you. Rock On.
Fil, why not start a "naughtotune" label/certification for artists? It would be like the organic food certification labels. You could run a certification business!
Singers voices should not be pitch corrected. If it has to be used at all, maybe it would be a little help on a note that can't be hit. I dont like pitch correction because their voices sound robotic and takes out all of the emotions and expressions of the singers voice. What's a story without emotions? Its meaningless! I'd rather hear the singers' natural voice, the emotions, the expressions, flaws and all. Thank you, Fil, for explaining this in specific detail so we can understand it. Keep up the good work!
Not entirely true actually I mean their even pitch correcting; Andrea Bocelli, Lucy Thomas, Jonathan Antoine etc...just to name a few world class singers and the emotion and expression still comes through although what I would say is because the sound has been manicured to an extent their voice loses a sense of vulnerability which you'd hear more in a live concert environment without any studio sound booth gimmicks.
Doesn't this have a psychological affect on singers who genuinely have good voices? Being told natural isn't good enough anymore. We are being cheated of all the natural voices that make music unique and interesting. Thumbs up for making us aware of this.👍🙂👍
Preach brother! When you listen to a singer like Dinah Washington you literally hear her smile. Ditto Amy Winehouse's sass or Louis Armstrong's grit. None of that lies on the lines. Ridiculous.
or Joni Mitchell...or how about Jerry Lee Lewis!!! It's so silly but I think people think of the ramifications of fake talent and the concept of what music is all about. I hope people will wake up in time. @@myopicautisticmetal9035
On a season of Australian Idol, Anthony Callea sang The Prayer. When he did it live it was amazing. The passion and build in that song brought me to tears. (several times) Everyone thought it was so beautiful. Naturally Idol wanted to cash in on this so released it as a single. It was .... good. No passion no tears. It was like his voice instead of ending in passionate spikes, was round and thick. It had been tweaked and 'corrected' to death.
Well done, Fil. you're right. My simplest complaint is badly applied pitch correction "sets my teeth on edge". Further, consider the 'recording industry' game. First, to be clearer, by making every singer sound similar (by pitch correction), the 'industry' producers and marketers become more important, because they are the ones gaining power to shape the music the public hears. Second, by pushing all music to a common scale, sampling, mixing, looping, etc. become much easier. Again, the 'creative power' moves away from the artist and towards producers or even industry executives. By making singers sound similar the industry is ensuring 'continuity of supply; one singer can be replaced by another. Manufacturers want uniform ingredients because it makes manufacturing cheaper and quicker. Ultimately, uniformity ensures a manufacturer can use the cheapest ingredients, or force ingredients' prices 'to the floor'. Great artists will lose out to weaker artists. This shifts money away from artists towards producers and industry executives. Finally, by removing the emotion created by the singer's inflection and pitch, music is either 'pasteurised' (drained of unusual or unique emotion), or the producer become free to re-introduce the emotion they want to convey. None of that feels good for artists, or for music consumers. Well done Fil. ☮ I will add, the 'everybody is doing it' argument is very worrying. It was used in propaganda, 'normalising' unnecessary or aberrant behaviour. It's almost an excuse for 'mob mentality', with extreme examples during the 20th century practised by 'people' wearing swastikas. History shows persuading a population that doing something unnatural or artificial should become the norm does not play out well. Take food as a different, but universal example. It took years to recognise that spraying crops with DDT, or injecting animals with steroids or growth hormones had serious health consequences for the humans that eat those foods. For many, music is 'nourishment for the soul'. Let's imagine what happens when peoples souls are starved of nourishment, History indicates bad outcomes.
Hello Fil; this isn't just one of the most important videos you've made, it's one of the most important videos on the net! Very well explained, I feel.
The industry wants pitch correction, also because it cuts down on studio time, with fewer re-takes and smaller staff, so it's a race towards "zero cost" recording.
I wonder why someone started doing re-takes at all! Listening to early phonograph records, they mostly did just one or two takes, and if they weren't usable the title was dropped and not issued by this artist. And all sorts of minor and major oddities happen - Caruso enters four bars early and sends the pianist scrambling to get together with him again, in the very record that reportedly secured him his New York MET contract in 1903, because despite the really obvious blunder it sounds so glorious and spontaneous! We hear Tamagno coughing and clearing his throat, Calvé talking to (and on occasion shouting at) her accompanist and the recording engineer, Paderewski hitting many piano keys not intended by the composer, De Lucia counting time during an interlude, Marconi failing to do so and missing every possible entry - and yet, nobody would doubt that these simple, faulty, primitive records are vivid souvenirs of great singers that make one wish we had their equivalent on the operatic stage today. Their personalities rise triumphant from noisy grooves and all-too-human blunders. It's only bean-counters who hear only notes but no music who desire and "demand" note-perfect, noise-free, "perfectly mixed" recordings. And the more influence these soulless, tuneless bureaucrats called "producers" have gained, the fewer and farther between have great recorded performances become. In classical music (the first genre to be infected by the "the recording must agree with the score in all details" disease), most legendary performers and recorded performances predate the invention of magnetic tape, i.e. they were recorded direct-to-disc in 5-minute takes corresponding to 78rpm record sides. Same with vintage jazz and blues. No editing. No conscious "mixing" or meddling with the sound. Just music. It was still that way when Elvis sang for Sun Records (and these records are still valued higher than anything more elaborately "produced" he did in his further career...) And I don't see why this simple, honest, very cost-effective way of making records should not be good enough for 21st century audiences, when it evidently was for wealthy, well-educated early 20th century upper-class citizens (the typical buyers of expensive records by famous stage and concert stars in the early years).
You have put into words perfectly and explained so irrefutably everything I have been trying to say to others on this topic. Melodyne and pitch correction being the industry standard is a scourge on music as an artform.
I listen to my old vinyl albums from the 60s and 70s that all have no pitch corrections on them, quite a few are recorded in mono and all have scratches, crackles and hiss on them, that is what I call perfection.
You're a really good teacher. Your explanations make the argument so clear, especially when you use those analogies. Thank you for demonstrating why integrity is so important, especially in a teacher.
