Brace yourself: It's Britney Untuned! For real...

[blue2blue]

This is NOT "Britney Shreds" -- this is the real thing, a leaked 'warm up' outtake from the sessions for Ms Spears' Britney Jean album. ("Alien" is the track.)

 

The vid player is a bit hinky (perhaps from traffic); I had to reload the page a couple times. (There's also a 15 second ad before the song.)

 

If you can't/don't want to listen to the whole thing and want to just cut to the chase -- go to about 2'40"...

 

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/9/588...ck-no-autotune

 

 

EDIT:

My feelings on this continued to evolve as the discussion wore on.

 

​Ultimately, I regretted following the viral impulse with this, for the reasons that producer William Orbit lays out in the bit I quoted in post # 7, below.

 

Ultimately, I decided, it is private material. It wasn't part of an album. It wasn't something she meant to put out. It was work byproduct that was not intended for release.

[Mark L]

Hee hee. This is all over the internet

 

In Britney's defence, at least she hits the right notes occasionally

 

I don't use autotune. I just double-track my vocals. Hides a lot of errors...

[nat whilk II]

Hmmm....I'm hearing some artifacts on some of those sour notes.

 

No way to know, but could it be somebody untuned her on purpose for a slagging opportunity on the "people will believe anything negative" internet??

 

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

Nat, I think that's just that aggressive 'vintage' compression that's so popular with 'modern' thinking engineers now. (Take a two knob compressor and twist away until everything sounds clipped off and in your face.) It makes the starts and ends of words particularly 'chuffy.'

 

If they'd taken in-tune vocals and performed the moves you'd need to create her 'performance' in the clip above, you'd hear all kinds of formant tweaking where they bent once-in-tune phrases to the sea-sick pitch veering we hear in the outtake. Er... "warm up."

[UstadKhanAli]

I have no idea if this is real or what - I also believe hear AutoTune artifacts here - but it's really uncool that any engineer would leak something like this or release something for the sole purpose of making her sound bad.

[UstadKhanAli]

^^^ I say this, and I doubt she's a really talented singer, but y'know, they're working on an album. I have lots of scratch takes from talented vocals that sound like ass. As well as guitarists and bassists and drummers and that kind of thing, but it doesn't see the light of day.

[blue2blue]

Guys, it's all over the mainstream media at this point.

 

Here's USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/m...oice/12471017/

Here's the UK's Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/m...-to-Alien.html

 

And here's what the album's producer, the well-known and respected William Orbit wrote on his Facebook page in response to the unfolding brouhaha:

Dearest Music Lovers, I have heard that Britney vocal link that everybody’s been discussing. It has been impossible not to as there have been many comments directing my attention to it. [i won’t re-posting it here]. I'd like to affirm that ANY singer when first at the mic at the start of a long session can make a multitude of vocalisations in order to get warmed up.

 

Warming up is essential if you’re a pro, as it is with a runner doing stretches, and it takes a while to do properly. I’ve heard all manner of sounds emitted during warmups. The point is that it is not supposed to be shared with millions of listeners.

 

A generous singer will put something down the mic to help the engineer get their systems warmed up and at the right level, maybe whilst having a cup of herb tea and checking through lyrics before the session really kicks off. It’s not expected to be a ‘take’.

 

I think that 99% of you reading this will totally understand.

 

Whomever put this on the internet must have done so in a spirit of unkindness, but it can in no way detract from the fact that Britney is and always will be beyond Stellar! She is magnificent! And that’s that.

 

Sincerely, William

source: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamOrbi...52841324499863

 

OK?

[UstadKhanAli]

Well, he's exactly right. I don't think much of her singing, but this kind of thing is a black eye to recording engineers everywhere. If you don't respect an artist, don't f***ing work with them.

[blue2blue]

I'll tell you, as sympathetic as I am with Orbit and the uncomfortable position he's been put in, you kind of have to wonder about why something like that track was even kept in the first place. It was a time bomb waiting to go off.

 

But, professional discretion and ethics aside, I think this resonates with a lot of people who are repulsed by the notion that pop music is dominated by manufactured 'artists' who are essentially little more than walking screens that others' group efforts are projected onto.

 

People know the movies are fake.

 

But a lot of them had the silly notion that music is real.

[UstadKhanAli]

You know my feeling on manufactured AutoTune performances.

 

I'm "old fashioned" because I wan to hear people sing. I mean actually sing. And I think that the public often does as well, or current pop artists like Adele wouldn't make such a huge impact. Singing beautifully with emotional conviction shouldn't be a radical notion.

 

And I can't help but think that deep down inside, many people know. They know what is real and what is not. After all, does *anyone* sound like AutoTune when they are singing in front of you?

[blue2blue]

Oh, I'm not so sure they do, to be honest. I've seen people claim to hear no tuning on stuff that's just dripping with it. I mean, supposed recording engineers. Go figure.

[nat whilk II]

Sheeeeeyaitzky.....you can just take your phones off a second, or someone's making a distracting racket, or you can get a glob of phlegm in the pipe, or you're listening to something else for a sec, any of which will make you sing badly for a bit.

 

I really, really, really hate this kind of "OMG - we have 3 seconds of somebody doing something embarrassing to themselves (in a close-to-private or entirely private situation) and we can create a BIG DEAL and maybe F**THEM UP! by posting it on the internet!!! Do it, dude!!!!"

 

Lordy, can't someone even fart and not have it GO VIRAL??? There's something really messed up about the way these things can go down....

 

and this messes up William Orbit, a stellar fellow and one of the great pioneers of electronic music...now I'M MAD arrrrggghhh....

 

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

Sure. It's like sneak photos. As Orbit says, the vocal track in question was never intended to be heard.

 

 

My grave misgivings about synthesized music stars notwithstanding, I've come around to the notion that this is something where more people (like me) should probably have resisted the impulse to pass it along.

 

Nonetheless, the fact so many others also gave in suggests those misgivings are shared. Maybe we're reaching some sort of cultural saturation point as to just how much illusion is tolerable in our cultural affairs.

 

Or, maybe to be concerned about it is to mark oneself as someone who wouldn't have got Warhol's soup can back in the day. As people have noted, it's not exactly news to most musicians and recording types that Ms Spears is no stranger to tuning.

[MikeRivers]

This is NOT "Britney Shreds"

 

Gee, what a letdown. Then I re-read this and see that you wrote "Shreds" instead of "Sheds". Oh, well. Back to my fantasies.

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

I have no idea if this is real or what - I also believe hear AutoTune artifacts here - but it's really uncool that any engineer would leak something like this or release something for the sole purpose of making her sound bad.

 

I agree Ken. It was totally unprofessional, and if it was an engineer who leaked this, and the word gets out as to who it was, it will probably end their career. And IMHO, rightfully so.

 

However, now that it is out, commenting about it is not unethical. Especially since I had nothing to do with it.

 

I've heard plenty of flubs on warm-ups and first passes / takes too, but the suggestion that she's intentionally uttering those sounds in an attempt to warm up seems like quite a stretch to me. She's definitely out of tune, and she does it fairly consistently in the same places in the melody line. I would guess based on that that she wasn't as familiar with the song at that point as she probably should have been. I suppose she could also have been struggling with a cue mix that wasn't dialed in to her satisfaction yet and was having a hard time hearing herself.

 

Even taking those things into consideration and giving her the benefit of the doubt, she's still not "stellar" or "magnificent" - in fact, she sounds fairly ordinary and average; even "bad." That's from the perspective of someone who has logged literally thousands of hours in recording studios, and who has worked with a wide variety of different singers of every skill level. YMMV

[UstadKhanAli]

I agree with that assessment, Phil.

 

If her vocal has not been doctored.

 

I believe I heard AutoTune artifacts. If that's actually the case, the engineer took something that was probably not the greatest vocal and effed it up some more to make it even worse than what it was, which is doubly uncool.

[Anderton]

Actually, I like the arrangement and production. It definitely sounds like there are artifacts...but what I really expected was for her to say "Hey, can I have some more volume in the headphones?!?!" about halfway through. If you can't hear yourself it's hard to hit pitch.. Well, at least it is for me.

[Anderton]

On the other hand...it got me to listen to a song of hers, and now I want to hear the album. William Orbit always does interesting stuff.

[Phil O'Keefe]

I agree with that assessment, Phil.

 

If her vocal has not been doctored.

 

I believe I heard AutoTune artifacts. If that's actually the case, the engineer took something that was probably not the greatest vocal and effed it up some more to make it even worse than what it was, which is doubly uncool.

 

I concur.

 

It could also be done with comping, and if the person doing it was good at it, most people would be completely unaware it wasn't sung in one pass. Everyone flubs stuff occasionally; even the best singers do. Give me three passes / takes, and I can make almost anyone sound bad. Or good. It's the same process, except instead of looking for the great, emotive, and in-tune phrases that work well together, you grab the flubs and comp those together instead.

 

Using your editing or Autotuning skills to intentionally make someone look bad is completely unethical. Again, if they are able to determine who was responsible - for leaking it, as well as for tampering with it (if that indeed happened - and I remain slightly skeptical about that since I would have expected William Orbit to mention it if that was the case), then their career is over. No one would trust them ever again, and trust is crucial in the studio. If you can't trust your engineer to have your back, or to at least not stab you in the back, you're not going to want to work with them, because as you know, in the process of making a record, everyone has unguarded and less than stellar moments that are never intended for public display.

 

I agree that it's doubly bad if someone tampered with it. It's almost like a form of electronic libel - you're creating, and attributing a negative "false statement" to someone else. I see no parody protection here. If that happened, it's a "published" (leaked to the public) false performance that is damaging to her reputation. I suspect there would be grounds for a lawsuit based on that, if in fact it was tampered with in an effort to make her look bad.

[blue2blue]

Actually' date=' I like the arrangement and production. It [i']definitely [/i]sounds like there are artifacts...but what I really expected was for her to say "Hey, can I have some more volume in the headphones?!?!" about halfway through. If you can't hear yourself it's hard to hit pitch.. Well, at least it is for me.

Hell, it's always hard for me. I remember one year I don't think I was on pitch once...

 

 

With regard to whether or not it was doctored to make it sound worse, it was all over the media and Bill Orbit wrote that note (quoted) on his Facebook page about it. I would think that if it had been doctored, he would have rushed to denounce it as fake, since he was obviously trying to defend his client and mitigate the damage caused by whoever leaked it.

 

FWIW, Phil, though I did end up regretting reposting the link for the reasons I stated, for sure, I agree, I don't think there's anything at all unethical or unseemly about discussing it.

 

 

And, as I noted, I think a lot of regular music listeners are beginning to feel somehow 'cheated' or 'punked' -- and maybe even starting to feel about musicians like they feel about politicians. They like the ones they like, but as a class, they're beginning to look down on them as rich, spoiled fakes.

 

And, certainly there ARE some -- and the most obnoxious of them ARE supremely obnoxious without question (ya listening Kanye?) -- but with so many excellent musicians working so hard to make so little money, it's really sad when the talentless, the crass, and the synthetically crafted become the stereotype.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Oh' date=' I'm not so sure they do, to be honest. I've seen people claim to hear no tuning on stuff that's just dripping with it. I mean, supposed recording engineers. Go figure. [/quote']

 

Agreed, but to be fair, I've heard raw, unprocessed vocals that had what sounded like Autotune artifacts, when none was used.

[Notes_Norton]

 

1. Leaking the audio was unprofessional
   
2. If doctored to make her sound bad it's cruel
   
3. Coming to her defense is honorable and that leads me to believe it's not doctored
   

I hate Auto-tune. There are millions of good singers who CAN sing in tune playing all across the country in small venues. Why should a no-talent take their place in stardom? The game is rigged. I guess it always has, but at least the people propelled by the machine to stardom could at least sing or if they couldn't, they did it honestly (think Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Fred Astaire, Bob Dylan, etc.)

 

I'm an adequate singer, and I have much more control than that on the very first song I sing at night with no warm up. My duo partner is a truly great singer, but we will probably never get that kind of promotion.

 

Auto-tune is evil

 

Notes

[blue2blue]

 

Agreed, but to be fair, I've heard raw, unprocessed vocals that had what sounded like Autotune artifacts, when none was used.

Sure. That said, I've gotten reasonably good at sorting out the various Celtic and other vocal tricks that sometimes strike the ear as pitch-jumps, as well as the eery note-lock some singers can engage (Kurt Elling comes to mind).

 

In fact, the very first time I heard Elling -- back in '91 -- I was half-convinced they had used some sort of pitch shifting on his voice. The way it locked on notes at times seemed to suggest some form of digital manipulation to me. (And when A-T reared its ugly head, dang if it didn't sound like I'd imagined.) I've listened to a fair amount of Elling since then and he now sounds human to me. Mostly. [That last not to suggest that he uses tuning; just that sometimes it still seems almost super-human.]

 

Five years before I'd worked on a record where we used a Harmonizer to repitch one note, flying it in from a second deck where we'd parked the shifted note on a do-or-die punch. I'd heard of people doing that with varispeed but the Harmonizer made it easier.

[blue2blue]

Y'know, it's a recurring meme in these discussions that artists like Spears and the other post-MTV pop divas have to do these elaborate stage shows and dance routines, so naturally they have to lip sync it all.

 

Ever seen a Broadway show?

 

Singing, dancing, lots of it, and often at the same time. All live and all to a live orchestra. (Granted there are exceptions, particularly in regional and community theatre -- but even there you can occasionally see some people doing stellar work in often highly compromised situations.)

 

A couple weeks back, at my mom's urging, I saw a roadshow production of Les Miserables. Not a huge amount of dancing, admittedly (but some GREAT singing, not really my style, but just smack on, nonetheless) and the cat playing Jean Valjean does a moderately lengthy aria -- while carrying around the (very real) 'body' of one of the other male characters. I mean he's blasting out these very well sung phrases while hauling what looks like about 140 pounds of adult, human male, slumped in his arms, one under the guys shoulders, the other under his knees. Back and forth across the stage. In pitch and time. Under stage lights.

 

Just sayin'.

 

_____________________

 

 

I think Notes_Norton's attitude is probably not unlike a lot of regular folks outside the biz, too. There are a lot of hometown heroes and heroines out there wowing their audiences. When people hear someone who's a church secretary or a warehouseman during the week get up in the community theatre production and sing their heart out, bringing the (admittedly proud hometown) audience to their feet -- and then they go home and hear even the official release version of this -- with its obvious robo-tuning and slick, plastic-surface production -- I think it can't help but make folks just that much more cynical about the 'sham' and 'fakery' that the music biz represents to them.

[Vito Corleone]

Movies, Broadway and Pop singing are apples and oranges and always have been. There have always been "no talents" who achieved great stardom while the "real singers' toiled in the shadows. Pop stardom has NEVER been about who is the best raw vocal talents.

 

Modern technologies tend to make these differences more pronounced, I suppose, but how is Britney Spears using auto-tune or singing along with tracks live any different than Marni Nixon supplying the vocals for Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady"?

 

That stuff happens because Julie Andrews wouldn't sell as many movie tickets as Audrey. And because Britney's pop albums and live concerts sell a lot better than Kristen Chenoweth's.

 

As far as Broadway singers dancing and singing at the same time? Yeah, there's some of that. Nothing that really comes close to the singing-and-dancing marathons that pop-star concerts have generally become over the last decade or so.

 

But again, all that stuff exists for different reasons and different audiences. Musicians don't like Britney Spears and how she does it? Why would they? Her product isn't intended for them and never has been. Any more than Marilyn Monroe movies were intended to appeal to other professional actors and actresses.

 

The only thing I'll really say about auto-tune is I suspect such technologies might create a laziness among certain singers who become used to the engineers being able to fix-it-in-the-mix. For someone like Britney who has never been anyone's idea of a good vocalist in the first place, I could easily see that becoming a very bad habit.