Seal's new album - System

[chipmcdonald]

There are more phenomenon, i.e. singer who intonate relatively far from known temperaments but sound perfectly right, for example David Bowie is such an artist with a very unique intonation.

 

 

I say Seal falls into this category. I'm very pitch sensitive and I love his recordings, although live he seems uncertain. The live thing sounds like not being able to deal with a certain type of monitor mix situation.

 

Then there's Morrisey. Sometimes I can't tolerate him, other times I find it curious, he has what I consider his own temperment; he's consistent with it, and it works artistically IMO. Same goes for Liz Fraser. They have an internally-logical temperment. You can have "off-pitch" notes, but they have to be steady and consistent, not random.

 

Or has an internal logic as I was saying. There's Bulgarian music that is "horribly out of tune" but sounds wonderful IMO, because it follows a certain logic.

 

Jeff Beck is the king of that; half of what he does is "out of tune" but it sounds like Jeff Farking Beck.

 

Which is 1000x better than a "perfectly" intonated and Perfectly Boring singer IMO.

 

/ Hardly anything is "perfectly" in tune. I used to get what I call "pitch sickness" where *everything* sounds out of tune: noticing pitch bend on attacks, weird overtones, equal temperment intermodulation. I think it's related to serotonin imbalances...

[John Sayers]

I love his recordings, although live he seems uncertain.

I feel that way too, I also agree with the rest of your post

[Synonym Music]

If you're talking about AT -- I agree. But I hear it a lot in stuff where it's clearly not being used as an effect. I've heard it in Ricky Skagg's bluegrass recordings for crying out loud. And on more than a few vocals by contemporary artists with jazzy pretensions. (I'll flick on my cable TV jazz channel when I'm pausing a DVR program for a while so as not to burn in the TV screen... they have a lot of stuff on that I wouldn't seek out.) And then there's stuff that's crazy obvious but still seems like an attempt to make us think it's actual singing. Spurred by mention in a thread at GearSlutz, I listened to a track from the new Duran Duran album. Hoo boy. I don't have a problem with people using it to correct a problem if it is truly transparent. I don't think there's anything wrong with making a studio recording as good a package as you can; I think a certain amount of editing and fixes are expected. But just as I don't want to hear a pop or rhythmic glitch on a tape or computer splice -- I don't want to hear the wrenchmarks of heavy-handed Autotune use to distract me from the illusion that I'm hearing someone perform (on some kind of level). Obviously, if someone is using AT as an effect, as in the new Britney Spears album, that's another matter. No one would ever think she's trying to make us think she sings like a cross between a robot and a sampler. I think there's considerable more integrity in such an approach.

Yeah... That approach gets boring as {censored} when you hear it on every single song through a record. Remember how they always use the quarter note delay with Dido?

God. It was a 90s production cliche hangover and it stuck around thanks to Rollo Armstrong.

[Ernest Buckley]

Just got the album yesterday. There are some really nice tracks on here and I like the sound quality of the record considering lots of it is dance. However, it seems to get weak toward the middle of the album and dies a slow death. And yes, I`m a huge Seal fan.