A brief and informative piece on the hometracked blog discusses the overuse of pitch correction processing in recorded music. It comes complete with an audio sampling of 10 of the most egregious examples of this production iniquity. Some of the examples used in the audio sample are kinda subtle, but thankfully Des McKinney (the article doesn’t have an author credit, so I’m assuming he wrote it) points out the places in each sample where the pitch correction occurs.

I despise pitch correction. In the former days of my band/studio adventures, when one of us was struggling with a vocal part, we either…

1. Learned to sing it correctly (for me, this meant enlisting a vocal teacher for a brief period before re-singing one particular part).
2. ‘Punched it in’ about 1,000 times until we got it right. This simply means that we sang that portion of the song over and over again but only recorded the trick phrase. We did this until it was right… or at least acceptable. This is why our producer just about fainted with delight when he heard the background vocals on this song. I’m not gonna tell you how long it took.
3. Gave the lead vocal to someone else. There were no prima-donnas allowed in the band during our brief but incredibly non-illustrious recording career.

 

Mr. McKinney must realize as I do that pitch correction is currently so common that it seems to have become just another effect (in fact, McKinney does realize this, which becomes obvious when reading the comments to his post). Why? I don’t know. I hate it. Hearing it in a song is enough to make me never listen to that recording again.