Some say a wedding isn’t a wedding without a fight. In some communities, it’s the highlight of the day.
I’ve never actually seen a wedding brawl myself, but I had a ringside seat at a wedding reception that saw music producers and musicians quietly alligning themselves against the ‘non musicians’ present. The tension stayed beneath the surface but it was tangible.
And it was funny. And it was a sign of the times. Previously indulged along the lines of Eno’s art rock agenda, non-musicians crossed a line during the 1980s with the popularisation of sampling and the use of turntables as an instrument. As synths, samplers and drum machines opened creativity to the ‘untrained and untalented’, these non-musicians stepped out of the avant garde and became a clear and present danger in the eyes of the musical establishment.
According to many ‘real’ musicians of the day, Midi was a four-letter word. Musical Idiots Demand It, they scoffed. Worst of all were DJs and their turntables… It was as if the premier of The Rite of Spring had never taken place.
I have long been fascinated by electronic music of all kinds, alongside many of its organic alternatives. The ability of synthesisers to produce sounds I’d never heard before was one of the reasons I got into music. And the electronics in music remains one of the fascinations of recording studios. So while I have a great love for dedicated players and their music, electronics and experimentation are all right by me – whether that means dropping cutlery down the back of a piano, pushing a Stratocaster into feedback or using vinyl as a sound generator.
A particular love is the vocoder – the voice encoder. Derived from 1930s military research into encoding and transmitting electronic voice messages, I never saw this in the same light as the frightened old school saw some electronics. It was never an alternative to conventional singing but another texture to call on, as the likes of Kraftwerk and Fashion prove. Related triumphs are Roger ‘Zapp’ Troutman’s use of a guitar voice box with a synthesiser and, of course, Sparky’s Magic Piano.
Code breakers
A couple of interesting releases caught my ear while treading trade show floors in the 1990s. The first of these was Antares’ AutoTune (initially a software release in 1997, I think) and the other was the Alesis airFX. One appeared to be an alternative to endless retakes, spinning-in or cut-and-paste as a neat way of tidying up vocal recordings, while the other was a completely new take on controlling effects processing (particularly in performance).
I bet on the wrong horse.
With 50 onboard effects processes, the airFX was typical of the combination of technical prowess and lateral thinking that gave Alesis founder Keith Barr a particular place in the audio industry. Although he passed away in August this year at age 61, his legacy lives on in a string of innovations that exploited new music and recording technologies at unprecedented price levels.
For its part, airFX used ‘patent-pending Axyz technology [which uses] an infrared beam that can be manipulated in three dimensions, along the X, Y and Z axis. Using triangulation, up to five different parameters can be controlled in each preset program’.
Real-time control of panning, flanging, pitch shifting and filtering was achieved using the hands, and the design of the unit left little doubt that it was aimed at DJs. Its presets included Vinylizer, ‘a scratchy vinyl simulator and a scratching effect that emulates the sound of rocking a vinyl record as it plays on a turntable’. Others emulated vocoding, synthesiser and percussion effects.
With the cult of the DJ at its peak, I was convinced of its imminent success.
But Alesis’ descent into Chapter 11 insolvency saw this, and many other of the company’s projects, abandoned.
All was well with AutoTune for around a year after its launch – until the release of Cher’s ‘Believe’ in 1998, in fact. Rather than using AutoTune to subtly correct poor pitching, this celebrated its audibility, stepping firmly into vocoder territory. One of the best-selling singles of all time, this song put AutoTune into high gear and on a different track. Dance music was instantly seduced by its characteristic electronic voice, nowhere more than where a vocalist couldn’t hold a note…
Now invideous, AutoTune follows the Yamaha DX7 ‘Rhodes’ preset, the Simmons SDS5 kick and snare, and samples from ‘Funky Drummer’ and Lyn Collins’ ‘Think (About It)’ onto the list of sounds that were too good to miss – and became too familiar to love.
My vocoder fascination stands damned by association.
Maybe there was a warning in Herbie Hancock’s 1978 album Sunlight: ‘The vocals on this album were realised through the use of the Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201,’ the sleeve notes explained. ‘This remarkable machine allows the articulation of human speech to be encoded on the tonality of a musical instrument. The voices you are hearing are entirely synthesised. The individual characteristics of Herbie’s voice (ie diction, accent, volume etc) combine with the pitch or melody and phrasing played on the synthesised keyboard. Background parts are played/sung by the use of polyphonic synthesisers.’
Hancock made a point of introducing the track in his live set by adding: ‘With this device, even a keyboard player like Herbie Hancock can sing!’
Pitch factor
The evils of AutoTune were made complete when it was discovered that it was being used to correct out-of-tune performances on the X Factor talent show in the UK. Defended by a ‘spokesman’ as part of the show’s aim ‘to deliver the most entertaining experience possible for viewers’, it is hardly consistent with the expected abilities of a great singer, or the audience’s ability to recognise their talent.
Perhaps it’s time to get more rootsy with pitch control as part of the creative process. If Eventide was good enough for Frank Zappa, it’s good enough for me.
But I wonder how the Musicians’ Union view AutoTune – a job creation opportunity, perhaps?