this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023

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Cher Says The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Can Go Fuck Itself (www.stereogum.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Or maybe they just listened to the Sesame Street theme song from 1972? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMDCjA9_-tM Cause Vocoder and talk box were around way before Cher and her producers. Believe was just a big hit song, nothing innovative about it, Kraftwerk had been using that king of sound almost 30 years before she did.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm fully aware of vocoders and talk boxes, that both work completely differently from pitch correction. The reason why people trace the roots of exaggerated pitch correction to Cher is because her song was the first (popular) one that sounded like exaggerated pitch correction and not like a vocoder or talk box. Most audio engineers I know doubt the claims that they used vocoders, but again who knows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I would agree that autotune might have kinda change music (although when used in a deliberately exaggerated way it doesn't sound much different from a vocoder), but to me Cher's song is just one of the pop hits that helped popularize the effect. IMO, it's just a very well-produced pop song, which contributed to the rise of a form of vocal processing that's very widespread today, which is already quite a lot. But it's not revolutionary in itself, it's very much in keeping with all the codes of pop music. For the records, I'm actually a teacher in audio engineering at a college and Univ so I've been quite interested in the over-popularity of this type of audio processing in recent decades.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The point is that it was the first pop hit to use it in that way. For what that's worth.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I agree. My point was that it didn't "change music forever" lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Exaggerated pitch correction like that sounds very different from a vocoder (at least any vocoder I've ever heard). I'm sure there are ways to get close to that sound using a vocoder and other tools if you really try to replicate it, but there's a reason pretty much everyone thought they used Auto-Tune even though vocoders had been around for a long time and they claimed to have used vocoders. And as it turns out, it was Auto-Tune.

And I'd argue the reason why she thinks she changed music forever (God I hope it's not forever) is because of how widespread that kind of use of exaggerated pitch correction has become. Not that it in itself was a completely new and different thing that was completely unlike anything anyone had ever heard ever and music is now played backwards with no notes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I read a more recent article where they discussed saying that to keep the production trick a secret. I'll have to find the article.

Edit: not the one I was thinking of but here's an article

That 'pitch machine' would turn out to be Auto-Tune, although Taylor would try and keep this a secret in later interviews, stating that it was a Digitech Talker that he'd used to throw people off the scent!

In 1999, he told Sound on Sound: "I played around with the vocals and realised that the vocoder effect could work. I used a Digitech Talker, a reasonably new piece of kit that looks like an old guitar foot pedal, which I suspect is what it was originally designed for. You plug your mic straight into it, and it gives you a vocoder-like effect, but with clarity; it almost sounds like you've got the original voice coming out the other end."

Taylor eventually revealed the truth about the process to The South Bank Show: "I was kind of playing around with the Auto-Tune, as it's called. With this you can shift the vocal, [and] go to to the nearest note. And then what it does is if you bend a note when you're singing, all this does is it goes along and it doesn't bend a note up until it reaches a certain point and then it just flicks to the nearest note, so you end up with these very 'steppy' sounds. Every note is an exact semitone. There is no sliding and that's where you get this crazy sound."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Would you look at that. Just as we all suspected. I thought they didn't want to say it was Auto-Tune because it was embarrassing.