Why do the majority of new songs SUCK these days?

[Oswlek]

I have to admit, I am unsure what autotune sounds like. Can anyone offer me an example or two?

[easilyspooked]

an example of autotune:

 

[YOUTUBE][/YOUTUBE]

 

used less onously to take a mildly off key vocal track and lock it to the guitar or whatever.

[Oswlek]

 

an example of autotune: used less onously to take a mildly off key vocal track and lock it to the guitar or whatever.

 

 

So, is basically every rap song autotuned? They all have this metallic sound.

[blue2blue]

 

I have to admit, I am unsure what autotune sounds like. Can anyone offer me an example or two?

 

Most anything in the last decade or so from the treacly Nashville pop outfit, Rascal Flatts will demonstrate really clumsy vocal re-tuning for correction.

 

There are artifacts all through this but if you want to really hear it, check out the words "wow" and "yeah, yeah" (starting around 17 seconds, the second yeah is more noticeable)... but, really, the song is just plug full of artifacts, some subtle, some pretty obvious. And all the wrenchmarks of shoddy, clumsy craftsmanship.

Zx6GOBXoT3o

 

 

 

This video below is one of my favorite, ever, Auto-Tune uses. If you're having trouble picking out the artifacts above -- listen to this pretty hilarious goof and then go back and listen to "These Days" from RF.

http://vimeo.com/3718294 ("Auto Tuning" by Casey Donahue)

 

 

It kills me every time.

[Lee Knight]

 

but isn't the point here, and every time this thread gets started, that music survives? that Product and Art are two different things made by two different sets of people for entirely different reasons and we should be damn proud to caste our lot with the punk-spirit diy bohemian brothers and sisters throughout the ages who have always pushed and advanced and created? isn't that what Rock And Mother {censored}ing Roll is? Coming together and seeing just how bleeding hot we get our tubes, how much fun we can have taking it from our bedrooms to the stage, how loud we can get it until everything is so loud that we need it to be quiet, and in turning down we create something new within us, an ever evolved eternally shifting paradigm of love? Rock Can't Die!

 

 

I stood up about half way through reading that. I began punctuating your text with shouts of "Yes!", "Amen!!" and "damn right!" and as I finished your last words of righteous rockin' love I sat down, leaned back in my faux Aeron, looked up at the corporate drop ceiling tiles and then whispered...

 

Hallelujah brother, hallelujah.

[Oswlek]

This video below is one of my favorite, ever , Auto-Tune uses. If you're having trouble picking out the artifacts above -- listen to this pretty hilarious goof and then go back and listen to "These Days" from RF. http://vimeo.com/3718294 ("Auto Tuning" by Casey Donahue) It kills me every time.

 

Thanks for this. Both were useful. To confirm I know what I am hearing, it sounds like quite a few of "top down, making the rounds" in the first verse are also getting some treatment. Am I correct?

 

In any event, I really didn't need another reason to not listen to Rascall Flats, but thanks for giving me one.

[blue2blue]

 

I stood up about half way through reading that. I began punctuating your text with shouts of "Yes!", "Amen!!" and "damn right!" and as I finished your last words of righteous rockin' love I sat down, leaned back in my faux Aeron, looked up at the corporate drop ceiling tiles and then whispered... Hallelujah brother, hallelujah.

 

As my pal Monte Vista (of the late and seldom lamented Lovingkindness*) used to say: Bang yo' head!

 

 

*The bit in that article about being completely covered in spit is no exaggeration. I was there and it was totally disgusting. Say what you will about the Dickies' phony-punk frat boy audience -- they might be as dumb as rocks and as charming as a bathtub full of cockroaches, but they sure could expectorate.

[grantsabbath]

hahahah I love that Casey Donahue bit.

[blue2blue]

hahahah I love that Casey Donahue bit.

Cool... I was beginning to think it was just me.

 

Everyone always links to the Auto-Tune the News stuff... but, for my tastes, the Casey Donahue thing is a lot funnier. Maybe 'cause I'm a web guy and there's some faint insider humor in the dialog... but mostly it's just the aplomb with which he rolls it out.

 

I suspect if he'd given it a more descriptive title, it would have a bigger viral span. I know that, at one point, I started to think I'd lost track of it. I'd seen someone post it under a header of "Auto-tuned office" and I figured I could just Google that... it wasn't so easy. That does reinforce the idea of the need for good naming and marketing strategies if one wants to maximize his exposure for his effort.

[tbry]

 

To sum it up-why music today sucks, it's because everything got more corporate. I have a billboard history of rock n roll book and when it gets to the mid 90's it talks about this period specifically. Thats when I noticed MTV changing, it seemed like an ok station before then, not great but certainly not what it is today. I remember obscurer artists like the Seattle bands and just less cool looking people like Cracker making it on the station... Alternative music became the Gin Blossoms, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20. Grunge became Creed and Bush. Even if you like some of those bands mentioned above, they were more commercial, not as much grit as Janes Addiction or the other Seattle bands that seemed more real. The problem with music or film for that matter today is it probably doesn't suck, its just harder to find. I have the internet, radio, MTV and I still hear more about the movie "Twilight" than the more artistic "Sin Nombre" which was a GREAT movie.

 

 

Its the corps alright! Always been about money but now only the large have the money to promote. Same in all corp structures. Travel to large towns and citys and its TGIF, Olive Garden, Red Lobster...on and on...look for mom and pop restaurants and they are mostly gone...big box company's have taken over the world and music too. Walmart is about the only place to get physical cd's. They are others but in general.

[Mcfontio]

So I'm still sitting here thinking about what you posted about the guitarists B2B.

 

The real distinction is when the solo becomes a phrase and not just a scale. Is that all you were talking about?

[blue2blue]

I listened to the Nightrage video...

 

I'd be lying if I tried to tell you I heard a single element there that hasn't been done thousands of times in my experience -- but I will say that they are at least encyclopedic in their collection of stylistic approaches, everything from cookie monster to pop metal to 70s style hard rock guitar harmonies, all floating -- sometimes a bit arhythmically -- above the standard doubletime chunk. (Which I guess is why you like some parts but not others. I perceive this as being part and parcel with the whole give-them-a-little-of-everything postmodernistic marketing blueprints employed by so many commercial bands over the last ten or twenty years. But look at it this way -- at least the Night rage song didn't have a rock-rap section. Small favors. A decade ago that would have been de rigeur.)

 

No, for sure, that's not my kind of music. But starting when I was in high school, I as I got older I pushed more, looking for harder, faster, edgier music until -- many years later -- I slowly realized I didn't even like the good stuff that I was hearing anymore... afer a while, I got so I was listening out of habit and because it fit my image of myself

 

I was delighted, at first, when speed metal started developing as a genre -- but my hopes for some new musical ground were soon crushed because I realized these were just guys whose only new idea was to make boring, imitative music faster. As I cooled on that front, I found myself looking to more outside sounds from noise bands like Skinny Puppy or Ministry... I have stacks of CDs that I listend to all the time -- for a time -- and have barely played since.

 

No, I'll admit that, right now, I'm not finding much music that satisfies my adventurous side... most of what I hear is retreaded and target-marketed to younger audiences who presumably don't get the fact that they're getting repackaged cliches.

 

About ten years ago I coined a term for the process: pregurgitation.

 

And that process seems to have almost completely taken over the commercial music sector. And though some of the the kids like to think of the mass-produced, highly refined product they consume as alternative in some odd fashion, it is actually smack-ass down the middle of the mainstream -- repackaging music that was tired ten or twenty years ago.

 

Mind you, I'm not singling out bands like Nightrage (who I don't think I'd ever heard of before but, you know, they ran out of memorable metal/rock names about a quarter century ago)... the dance, R&B, hip hop, Nashville pop, and emo markets are just as totally in the thrall of the marketing MBAs and lawyers as metal and 'modern' rock.

 

 

I sound negative, don't I?

[blue2blue]

And old. One thing us old guys -- or maybe this old guy-- can't quite get through his thick head is that today's kids haven't been listening to fifty plus years of rock and pop. But I have. No wonder it sounds old...

 

 

But, when I was a kid, the music scene really did evolve and grow.

 

Between the time I became aware of radio pop (about when I was four, riding with my mom who listened to the local pop station, just then starting to play some R&R) and my late 20s, the pop music scene went through intensely popular phases: early R&B and doo wop, rock and roll, country pop, twist music (and later the discotheque dances of the early 60s), surf instrumentals, the folk revival, the Bealtes/Brit invasion, folk rock, psychedelic/acid rock, prog, early 70s funk, glam, punk, no wave, disco, early rap and the beginnings of hip hop, new wave/power pop, and the early days of synth pop...

 

Each one was a burst of novelty and fresh sounds that enlivened the pop music scene and spurred interesting reactions in other music sectors... and the pop audience, at least until the mid 70s when demographically targeted marketing really started taking off, the pop market was broken into segments based on age, race, economic and political demographics -- and the marketers got a lot better at putting together marketing and image plans to help bands 'reach their true sales potential.'

 

And now it seems like the marketers just substitute costumes and fashion accessories for change. Like changing hemlines, the nature of things doesn't really mutate or grow, it just vacillates...

 

What's the only real innovation in the last 20 years in pop music?

 

Auto-Tune and robo-tuning.

 

There's been no real new music, just Frankenstein mash-ups of old, worn elements made 'new' by simply having a new pool of virginal ears and minds to market to...

[blue2blue]

So I'm still sitting here thinking about what you posted about the guitarists B2B. The real distinction is when the solo becomes a phrase and not just a scale. Is that all you were talking about?

When a string of notes becomes music.

 

That's what I'm talking about.

 

 

 

Are you thinking back to my use of the term scalar invention, by any chance? By that I simply mean the application of a formula to playing within a given framework.

 

It's a trend I noticed as some of the first crop of commercial music school graduates hit the pop music scene in the 70s and as the rock jazz hybrid of fusion gained momentum. Both the soulful, melody-driven and the intellectual, harmony-driven approaches were swept aside as fusion cast aside the complex chords and changes of bebop, replacing them often as not with a calisthenic approach that emphasized speed and sometimes seemingly arbitrary tempo and harmonic changes.

 

As those influences worked their way into rock -- and more and more rock guitarists were churned out of more and more commercial music programs -- we saw similar, if simplified, streamlined, and jacked up approaches being adopted in male-audience rock, where playing speed and 'ballsiness' are often seen as hallmarks of skill or passion.

 

 

Don't get me wrong... I found myself swept up, too, and I drilled to play faster and harder until one day I realized I was pushing myself to play music that didn't even interest or move me anymore. I was just playing it because I thought I could. (Trust me, I didn't have anything on today's grinders, but I was fast at some stuff.)

 

One day I just said to myself: I'm going to force myself to play slower and slower until I figure out how to make it sound like music, music that I want to hear.

 

 

UPDATE: With regard to cutting edges: I have to say that I'm every bit as frustrated with myself and my own current lack of pioneering spark... more, really... because it seems to suggest to me, once again, that I'm really just a consumer of pioneering change, using it to inspire myself... another ocean I'm just a cork bobbing on the surface of...

[grace_slick]

Oh my goodness me! My thread has exploded.

 

I get your point, Lee, about the concept of "sucking" sucking in and of itself.

 

OAF or whatever your name is, lol (no offence intended), I am not ashamed to be following Katy Perry on Twitter. It does not threaten my own beliefs of my good musical taste or my own arguable musical talents. lol

 

Sorock, Portia De Rossi is ok. She's so-so to me on the attraction meter. lol

 

I have a headache.

[Mcfontio]

I think this is more or less along the same lines as the OP Grace. Throw in a healthy portion of blabbering on my part and well, here we are.

 

Yea, you do sound a little negative B2B. I'm sure you'll find all the music we're making the same old bland minor chord progressions used since the baroque and simplistic standardized guitar licks. "at least... ...didn't have a rock rap section.. small favors" Well at least we aren't doing to whole mass marketing deal 'cause our lyrics are solely rap based. Though, the lyrics I think are the most intellectual/stimulating part by far.

 

I guess our only hope is to draw a crowd of young people who don't know {censored} from {censored} and hope people like you stay home. After all, I do live in a college town..

[grace_slick]

I am the OP. Aren't I? *vague*

 

Anyway, I refuse to ever use auto-tune, EVER, on any of my songs. BLEGH!

[Lee Knight]

Regarding Autotune.

 

I was listening to BBC 1 on Sirius Radio last night. It was a show that airs in the middle of the night over there and I was catching it in my evening time. The DJ was a crack up. A song would finish that was basically organized noise, literally, and he'd pause after and then whisper... Lovely!.

 

Anyway...

 

On the use of Autotune? My God... these guys have taken it to a truly artistic level. The chopping and dicing and tuning for obvious effect was astounding. I'm not talking Kanye or T Pain hack jobs here. This stuff is godlike. Truly a joy to listen to. Like Drums and Bass on acid.

 

Very cool. I know that not what's being discussed her but thought I'd share.

[blue2blue]

I think this is more or less along the same lines as the OP Grace. Throw in a healthy portion of blabbering on my part and well, here we are. Yea, you do sound a little negative B2B. I'm sure you'll find all the music we're making the same old bland minor chord progressions used since the baroque and simplistic standardized guitar licks. "at least... ...didn't have a rock rap section.. small favors" Well at least we aren't doing to whole mass marketing deal 'cause our lyrics are solely rap based. Though, the lyrics I think are the most intellectual/stimulating part by far. I guess our only hope is to draw a crowd of young people who don't know {censored} from {censored} and hope people like you stay home. After all, I do live in a college town..

 

Well... I was on a bit of a tear, there.

 

 

Like I said, I'm more frustrated with myself because, after all, this is hardly the only perceived slack time in pop music new sounds and creativity... I remember how incredibly ready I was for new music in the mid 70s and again in the mid-80s... in the mid 70s, it was, for me, the slack time between the incredible, successive bursts of new sounds throughout the 60s and early 70s...

 

In the mid-80s, it was the uncomfortable era when punk, which I'd been heavily involved with in the late 70s and had been one of the main genres I was interested in working with as an engineer in the early 80s became co-opted and commoditized... happily I got onto the neo-dub scene from Bristol and southern England, and that got me intrigued by the then-hot rave and club music scene; at the same time I got interested in noise bands... so when Nine Inch Nails's hard edged synth pop brought both electronica and noise elements to the spotlight, I really started getting interested.

 

A few years later, the dub and nascent trip hop scene blew up with Portishead. Portishead really worked for me... loved the approach of mixing postmodern and hip hop production techniques with the sounds of dub and guitars that didn't just repeat recent rock cliches. Unfortunately, a lot of other artists mistook the blueprint for the brilliance and by the end of the decade, the model of the geek producer and the dreamy chanteuse singing and occasionally rapping over slowly rolling, syncopated beats was its own cliche.

 

But, still, for a while at the end of the 90s and even a little into this decade, I was happy mining my own niche, a sort of mutant roots pop that mixed sometimes traditional writing and themes with new techniques and textures.

 

But I do get bored easily. Pop music bores me quickly. But, sadly, I also tire of my own music and approaches. I'm a marketer's nightmare [from so many angles ], someone who just can't work in the same style for more than a few years without getting bored and seeming to run out of ideas. Or tricks.

 

 

So... it seems clear to me that the problem for me is, ultimately me...

 

Instead of pacing around the empty halls of culture waiting for my personal next big thing, I should probably be going to the musics of the past and really looking at what I might use out of those, doing the same sort of hybridization and synthesis that adventurous musicans have done through time ('cause, for the most part, I'm pretty sure a whole new music is not going to spring, full bloom, from my forehead... it's going to be something that is recombined and manipulated and subverted).

 

 

Anyhow, back to your point, yeah... each generation does have to make their own music the way they want to make it.

 

Now, I think it would be great if today's musicians would throw away the best practices 'how to make it in the music biz' guides, magazines, and videos, that show them how to be just like everyone else and do everything the way a bunch of MBAs and lawyers want them to do it to make it easier to commoditize and monetize their music.

 

But that's for them, eh?

 

 

 

Still, it sure seems like there has seldom been a time in pop music when there was so little significant change in fundamental approach or new sounds or directions.

 

In fact, last night I was thinking about the hegemony of, let's call it, over-tuned vocals in pop and rock. (Vocals tuned for effect, but not applied with t-pain blunt force.)

And I thought to myself -- same-old, pregurgitated music forced onto the grid is the new sound...

 

But it doesn't really come from any sort of musical adventurousness or musical innovations or ideas or progress -- it comes from a tool created by a baby boomer -- a geological engineer, in fact, who figured out a way to apply the advances in underground geological analysis to the 'need' that few musicians then thought we had: a device for correcting the pitch of incompetent singers.

 

And, I'm as incompetent as the next singer, don't get me wrong, though I seldom use retuning.

 

But incompetent it is. Singing competence is hitting the notes and hitting the rhythmic marks. But look at how many engineers now rely on automatic vocal retuning and vocal re-alignment tools.

 

And they use similar tools to grid-ify sloppy drum tracks (and there is a perception in the recording community that that's pandemic among young and not so young bands) and guitars.

 

So maybe the sound of the grid and the crutch like tools we use to get there is the New Sound.

[rsadasiv]

 

Instead of pacing around the empty halls of culture waiting for my personal next big thing , I should probably be going to the musics of the past and really looking at what I might use out of those, doing the same sort of hybridization and synthesis that adventurous musicans have done through time ('cause, for the most part, I'm pretty sure a whole new music is not going to spring, full bloom, from my forehead... it's going to be something that is recombined and manipulated and subverted). snip So maybe the sound of the grid and the crutch like tools we use to get there is the New Sound.

 

 

That's where I'm at this year - studying the old songs and structures, whomping them onto a grid and then hoping that my inability to competently reproduce musical elements of the past looks like some kind of creative interpretation.

[blue2blue]

Heh. I've often used my own incompetence as a chaos factor.

 

It's a bit of a mixed bag...

[Mcfontio]

So maybe the sound of the grid and the crutch like tools we use to get there is the New Sound.

 

Now I think you're just being paranoid. But then again....

[blue2blue]

Well... it was something that occurred to me as I was chewing over this post. I have sort of a pamphleteer's mental process...

 

You do have to admit, though, I think, that it is the only real new sound or performance/recording technique to manifest in pop music in many, many years. I certainly haven't heard anything new or interesting in any genre I've listened to in years. I mean, pick a genre and I'm pretty sure I can point you to the same elements and approaches in music fifteen, twenty or more years old. I keep saying, I haven't heard anything really significantly new (except what some might call the over-enthusiastic embrace of obvious robo-tuning) since the late 80s or maybe mid-90s... in electronica, in rock, in country, R&B, hip hop... the hemlines go up and down... but nothing really much has changed in years.

 

 

Mind you, intellectually, I fully understand that it is not the popular culture's job to keep me inspired by artfully producing new and interesting cultural/music upheavals every few years...

 

That said, that churn was one of the reasons I paid attention... like a sort of bizarro world Centaur (who drew his strength from the earth and, when lifted off the earth, quickly became weak), I have long found myself energized and my creativity goosed by change and innovation in music. And, now I feel like change and innovation are no longer in the house...

 

So... you know... no real point in me railing about conditions that exist and that can only be changed in the future.

 

Best to just get to work in my own kitchen . (Not to jump from one half-baked metaphor to another. )

 

[rsadasiv]

That said, that churn was one of the reasons I paid attention... like a sort of bizarro world Centaur (who drew his strength from the earth and, when lifted off the earth, quickly became weak)

 

I have never seen Antaeus represented as a Centaur.......

 

[easilyspooked]

i think that the changes we're looking for in music suffer a number of darknesses. First of all, it's only 2010, i'm not sure we could say with certainty how different our music is from 1995, not for another few years, not until this music is on a compilation disc being sold on late night tv (in the backseats of our flying cars). Second, i'm not sure what kind of evolution we're looking for, since the Dawn Of Western Recorded Music, we have had Three kinds of music to my mind, Classical, Blues, and Country. Those genres have mixed and matched their modes and muses for the past hundred ot years and have produced an Amazing variety, but really, it's all from the same seed, and now we have universal access and stimulation overload, i think the Evolution is still there, it's just Subtle, i can tell apart Indie rock from the mid-90's and today, because Indie rock from the mid-90's was a mix of Grunge and Electronica, and Indie rock from today is a mix of Brit-Blues-Revivalism and Americana, now they sound very simmilar, but i think they came from different slots. Getting back to Evolution being Subtle in today's market, i think because of our general over-stimulation we're worse at picking out the differences, so maybe it's not a problem with the artists, but a problem with the consumers.