She takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon.
I've been doing voices as long as I can remember. When I was little I could pick up on sounds, and then I discovered you could distort what you hear and make people laugh or disrupt a class.
I use Auto-Tune but it's not to mask anything. If you come to see me live, I can sing on the spot. Auto-tune is just for the recording. It keeps everything really precise.
You can sing a very aggressive word in such a way that it's very funny. You can change words, completely turn them around on their head so that they mean exactly the opposite of what they are written down. There are endless possibilities which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings it. She makes you feel nauseous or horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that's an incredible power.
There's a lot of stuff you've gotta know about Auto-Tune before you can start using it, because it's the hot thing to do.
I would never ever sing at all if I could get away with it. I had pitch problems, no range. So what I did was manipulate the sound... that way you couldn't tell that I wasn't very good.
When young people hear auto-tune, they think that's real R&B. You have to get rid of all of the gimmicks.
I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything.
The Auto-Tune makes everybody sound the same and takes away all of the emotion because you're singing through this machine, and of course your taking all of this emotion out of your voice for the most part.
Musicians like James Blake were a big influence on me. How he uses his vocals is amazing. And then Yeasayer and Animal Collective, who aren't pop bands exactly, but they do something that is so catchy and undeniable and so much fun.
Everybody I've ever seen live sings out of tune, even the greatest singers in the world. And of course if you make a single nowadays, they'll autotune it anyway.
My secret talent is doing the chipmunk voice.
With voice overs... you're not thinking about the camera. So your voice becomes this thing that you can manipulate. And depending on the character you're doing, it's all concentration on your voice.
Oh my gosh! I can't tell you the number of times people have put autotune on my voice, and I'm like, 'Please take it off!' You don't even sound human; it makes you sound like a robot!
I do love voices so much that I will use them and manipulate them. The presence of a human voice in a piece of music is really exciting, even if it's just someone's breathing.
Yes, because as composers we are looking for textured voices, and often the singers we find are not trained to perform in a studio environment. So we need technology to doctor their voices to suit the format.
When I first used Auto-Tune, I never used it to sing. I wasn't using it the way T-Pain was. I used it to rap because it makes my voice sound grittier.
I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'
I wanted there to be something to fill the space and to catch the listener's ear, but I didn't want there to be any 'Virtual Self' songs that had a clearly defined vocal with lyrics and top line. If you do hear any lyrics, it's just your brain filling in the gap, because those moments are just various syllables combined.
Drake, the way he uses that Auto-Tune has always been attractive, hasn't it?
I think Eminem should use Auto-Tune.
I always say that when I was recording with Phil Spector, he would not let me really sing, you know? And even to make me sound younger, he would speed the track up. He still wanted that real nice, little, quiet, sweet little sound.
People got a little too self-conscious about the techniques that go into recording because sometimes, if you sing too well in tune, people accuse you of auto-tuning. It's like you have to use auto-detuning or something.
I admire ventriloquists, because I can't do that. I mean, I might get mistaken for a ventriloquist dummy every now and then, but I can't do what they do.
I love Ableton's vocoder and Operator for basic side subs and general low-end.
