Music today is in my opinion totally different to the music from say the 60's-80's. In the past musicians had to be REALLY good to get a deal, they actually had to play the instruments that they went on stage with, they had to be able to sing in key or play in key, the drummer had to keep the beat solid throughout the whole song, everything had to be played right. We didn't have ProTools, Logic Pro, or any other DAW system to record to see a pretty wave form, and then as a sound engineer go in and look for those pesky clicks, beeps, ticks, or whatever, everything was done with huge reel to reel tapes and if it wasn't right, you'd have to start again and record over what you'd already done. There were limits on the amount of tracks you could have depending on the machine or machines you were using, ProTools HD has a limit of 128 tracks of audio (As far as I know) which is FAR more than you ever got with tape. Have we become to reliant on the digital side of things, and completely forgotten about the analogue side? As a ProTools engineer how long would you spend tidying up that drum part so that everything is in time with the click if it was played out of time? Are we killing the real essence of the music with these "fixes"?
When a singer comes into your studio with maybe not a fantastic voice, but they can sing pretty much in tune and time with everything else, do you get them to record and record and record until you have enough parts to make up a whole vocal from the parts? In the past this was never really possible, yes you could splice tape together which took hours and hours and was an art in itself, but artists from that era trained their voices, or their ability with what ever instrument they played to make sure it wasn't needed. Why do we not think about this anymore? Where has the performance gone?
When we use a DAW such as ProTools we have the ability to use plug-ins for all sorts of things, EQ, compression, gating, effects, you name it there's probably a plug-in for it. One such plug-in that has become more and more widely used in recent years is the pitch correction plug-in whether it be Antares Auto-Tune, Celemony Melodyne, or just Logic's built in pitch correction. These plug-ins are used most often to correct a vocal line to bring it to "perfect pitch", which is normally done by the engineer during the mixing stage. Why do we as sound engineers feel the need to fix everything? I had a copy of Antares Auto-Tune a while ago and I don't think I actually used it on a final mix once, why you may ask, well personally as a musician I think it takes the human out of the human. Correcting something to be "perfect" to me takes the character out of the music, and surely that's what it's all about, the character, the essence, the performance.
Imagine you had a permanent Auto-Tune or Melodyne built into you with no way to turn it off, would you really be happy walking around day after day talking in perfect pitch, singing in perfect pitch, and even sounding exactly the same as every one else out there? I think not some how, so why oh why is it done so often these days, when back in the 60's-80's, even the 90's to some extent was it ok to be slightly out? I think it's because it kept the human factor in the music, and that is what has changed about music today, it's nothing to do with the audience wants to hear that in perfect pitch, or that it's more pleasing to the ear, in fact it has nothing to do with what the audience want at all I don't think. I think it's more to do with what we as listeners have been brain washed into thinking is the right way for something to be heard and personally I think that's wrong.
