By Dave Babbitt – Special to the Sydenham Current
The world of pop music disappoints me more and more each day. As an admitted YouTube-a-holic, one of my favorite channels is titled “Wings of Pegasus.” The channel is hosted by a British musician known as Fil, whose claim to fame is analyzing music performances from a technical standpoint.
Fil is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to music software, and lately has been calling out questionable performances by well-known, typically respected musicians. He can analyze a performance and tell listeners if Auto-Tune or pitch correction software has been utilized in a recording.
Readers may recall a recent quip I made about Don Henley of the Eagles being called out by Fil for lip-syncing in live performances of their hit song “Desperado.” Henley is simply too old to hit the highest notes any longer, so he seamlessly lip-syncs his performances of this song. Is that OK? Perhaps, if he was at least transparent about it. But he hasn’t been.
Lip-syncing is nothing new, and many will recall the name “Milli Vanilli,” a German duo from the late ’80s and early ’90s. I won’t go into details about them other than to say that in 1990, after scoring several worldwide radio hits and winning many awards, including a Grammy, they were suddenly exposed for not only lip-syncing their music but for the fact that their voices weren’t even on the recordings! The term “Milli Vanilli” is now considered a verb and is used to describe anyone lip-syncing or faking a performance in any way.
Fil has most recently been exposing YouTubers who have been using footage from shows such as *America’s Got Talent*, *Britain’s Got Talent*, and *American Idol*, and through the use of chroma-key technology, replacing the performers on stage with themselves.
It takes an amazingly well-trained eye and ear to catch this. But why does this matter? It matters because they are getting away with fraud and getting paid for it. They have been able to elude YouTube’s content rules, break copyright laws, and collect income based on YouTube’s payment system, which is based on the number of views a video receives.
Music-altering software, once only available to recording studios, is now available to the masses, allowing people with virtually no talent to commit musical fraud. Even I have a small digital mixer that has a pitch correction function, but I’m proud to say that I’ve never used it in any of my YouTube vocal quartet videos.
Readers should watch a YouTube video titled “How to Produce Pitch Perfect Acapella.” This will open eyes. The video demonstrates how a recording engineer can alter every individual note and turn an extremely poor vocalist into something spectacular and perfectly in-tune.
But music fraud today doesn’t stop there. There are many other tools that recording engineers can utilize to turn any performance into an almost perfect recording. Most recordings begin by laying down what is known as a “click track,” in which a metronome is recorded at a specific tempo so that all other musicians can “line up the notes” and play perfectly on beat. However, there are also tools that can be used after the fact to “quantize” a piece of music so that musicians with a poor sense of timing can always be on beat.
For many years now, a solo act playing a guitar and singing has been able to utilize a harmonizer that makes them sound like they are backed up by a full complement of singers in rich harmonies. Back in the 1990s, the late, great Andy Williams lamented the fact that his vocal art was being cheapened by the advent of technologies such as these.
While producers had some of these tools available to them in the recording studio, it took many years to develop the technology allowing for pitch correction “on the fly” in a live performance situation. Major stars today mount huge live productions that see them having to dance, move from one area of a huge stage to another quickly, disappear and reappear somewhere else on stage, and fly. It’s all but impossible to do that without being winded or singing off-key. For these reasons, they usually employ electronic means to keep them on-key or use pre-recorded tracks in the segments that are physically demanding. And the audience never knows.
My point in all of this is that, for the most part, at least in the world of pop music, much of what one is hearing on recordings or in live concert situations likely isn’t what’s going into the microphone.
But there is hope. There are still highly trained musicians who do not rely on electronic signal massaging. How about Barbershoppers? Next week, a group of us are headed to a concert by Voctave, the finest a cappella group I’ve ever heard. They will use microphones merely because of the size of the venue, but after a short reference note on a pitch pipe, they will present perfectly in-tune harmonies without any special effects.
Next month, almost 30 of us are headed to Brantford to see the famous Glenn Miller Orchestra. They will all be playing acoustic instruments that they tune with their ears and, again, utilize no special effects.
On October 19 at St. Paul’s Congregational Church in Chatham, our 55-piece Wallaceburg Concert Band will present “An Autumn Adventure,” again, with no special effects.
The next time one hears Gavin Warren play his clarinet, I can guarantee that what you hear coming out of the instrument is nothing less than acoustic perfection, with not so much as a microphone.
I do not intend to suggest that there are no pop musicians with talent. I can’t imagine someone like Michael Bublé, for example, stooping to using pitch correction on his vocals. He has too much pride. But I will suggest that many are manufactured talents presenting music that has been highly processed.
I will always reserve my highest respect for those who can sing or play in-tune, on beat, and without ANY electronic massaging.
