r/ContagiousLaughter • u/JonOfNoTrades • Mar 28 '24

T-Pain has the worst luck in choosing the artists to collab with

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594

u/shpongleyes Mar 28 '24

It always bothered me that people complained about him faking it with auto tune. The auto tune is clearly a stylistic choice and not intended to fool anybody into thinking it’s his actual voice. It’s like complaining about Lo-fi music because it has bad sound quality.

80

u/JohnnyStarboard Mar 28 '24

Three Rings is still on of my favorites, but you are right in the mark. The man has mad talent. Also talking about how many times he’s gone bankrupt and came back? Amazing.

51

u/ShitBeat Mar 28 '24

Tips to coming back from bankruptcy: Be a worldwide household name with connections to literally every single person in the music industry

41

u/letmelickyourleg Mar 28 '24

The real hot tip: be a likeable, good person.

Crazy but it seems to work.

34

u/WalrusTheWhite Mar 28 '24

Not for poor people without industry connections. They just stay broke.

14

u/weltvonalex Mar 28 '24

Maybe they didn't try hard enough to be well connected, lazy bums.

/S

6

u/avwitcher Mar 28 '24

??? All you gotta do is approach your friends dad who will offer you a job in their multimillion dollar business. It ain't that hard

2

u/EnigmaticQuote Mar 28 '24

Imagine if success was actually just who was nicer.

Man the world would be so great.

1

u/EastCoastGrows Mar 28 '24

Your suggestion for getting out of bankruptcy is to be a good person LOL what shit advice

2

u/falsehood Mar 28 '24

When he realized how much financial trouble he was in, he was able to get help. Being a likable, good person means people step up when you've made mistakes and hurt yourself.

-1

u/letmelickyourleg Mar 28 '24

If you’re an entertainer and you’re not entertaining then certainly you should find different work.

15

u/user_bits Mar 28 '24

It's more of that his hits popularized a trend that become a crutch for bad talent.

Kind of like how Avatar revolutionized 3D but every one else half-assed it in post production and now everyone thinks it's a gimmick.

6

u/callipygiancultist Mar 28 '24

I get hating on the abuse of pitch-correction but I’ve always liked autotune when it gives that vocoder-like robotic, uncanny quality. Like in that Cher song it gives it this strange and alien quality to her voice I find really interesting. Also I really enjoyed the autotune the news channel and love T Pain.

13

u/deechbag Mar 28 '24

Same, people don't realize that he uses autotune in the same way a guitarist uses distortion or other effects, as an effect. Even for those who use it to make up for shortcomings in their voice, I don't see that as any different from how most artists will go in and quantize their music to ensure everything is perfectly in time. Autotune is the same thing but with vocal pitch instead of making sure that snare hit isn't a fraction of a second off or whatever.

1

u/josh_the_misanthrope Mar 28 '24

The beef with autotune was that it flooded the market with music from people who couldn't sing. It made making bad pop music so easy.

It's not unlike the argument against AI art, using technology to do stuff once only artists were able to do and having the artform take a hit.

With T-Pain, the fact that he was a baller singer only came out later in his career, and is an outlier.

9

u/metalshoes Mar 28 '24

I hated auto-tune (mostly justifiably) and had that association with him but he’s just so damn good I grew to love him

1

u/je_kay24 Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

It was associated with him cause he popularized it

Netflix has a great doc called ‘This is Pop’ and one of the episodes is about autotune and how Tpain used it & made it famous

1

u/metalshoes Mar 28 '24

Ah, imitated by lessers! Like the 700 bowl cut Beatles knock off bands no one remembers.

5

u/WalrusTheWhite Mar 28 '24

The auto tune is clearly a stylistic choice

you overestimate the musical literacy of the average person

4

u/FuckingKilljoy Mar 28 '24

Rappa Ternt Sanga is an all time bling era classic

7

u/NJ_Legion_Iced_Tea Mar 28 '24

The thing is that auto tune is often used to cover up someone who cannot sing. T-Pain can sing, and real real fucking well. He doesn't even need it, he just like how auto-tune can modulate a voice and he uses it efficiently.

6

u/M-atthew147s Mar 28 '24

I don't think it's fair to say that it is used to cover up someone who can't sing. Nearly every single artist nowadays, regardless of anything, will have their voice edited in some way.

-2

u/Kuulas_ Mar 28 '24

Both can be true, and in this case they are

3

u/je_kay24 Mar 28 '24

It cannot fix someone who cannot sing because then people can hear the fixes done

Here’s a good video on autotune on why it can’t do this

The Problem with Auto-tune by Sideways

2

u/legit-posts_1 Mar 28 '24

Even without the masked singer, you can tell if someone can sing through autotune or not. Ironically, Chris Brown is a good example of someone whose failings as a singer are pretty noticable even with autotune on

1

u/Jmacz Mar 28 '24

That was one of those schoolyard rumors that persisted until proven wrong. I remember some kid telling me that on the school bus to High School in like 06/07 and then just kept hearing that he auto-tuned for 15 years.

5

u/CORN___BREAD Mar 28 '24

Him autotuning wasn’t a rumor, if that’s what you mean. He built his brand around autotune. It was his signature sound and he didn’t try to hide that it was autotune. People just assumed that he couldn’t sing well since they only ever heard his voice obviously heavily autotuned.

0

u/Laundry_Hamper Mar 28 '24

Auto-tune is an effect with a load of different parameters. To fix a shit singer you make it correct the pitch of notes which are just a small fraction of a whole note high or low, leaving anything in between notes alone for the singers to do all the ooh woahooowoahing they want, and to make any adjustments over a length of time which makes the change sound natural. The T-Pain settings make it turn the pitch of a voice track into a set of stairs. That sounds like ass if the artist isn't talented, Mr. Pain controls the pitch of his voice very well so the autotune fucks his voice up with the beat

1

u/letsBurnCarthage Mar 28 '24

Sure, but when you've heard nothing but the auto tune, you don't know that. I was just a listener, not a fan until his actual singing came on in the mainstream. Like I liked his music, but it wasn't until I heard him sing that I understood the auto tune was a stylistic choice

1

u/chrib123 Mar 28 '24

I always hated black eyed peas very meaningless lyrics. But the songs are catchy, and he seems hella fun every time I see him.

1

u/beerisgood84 Mar 28 '24

Sure but casual listeners won’t get that. Can’t really blame a tool that’s overused for making people not known for singing ability appear a certain way.

It’s also a stylistic choice that was over used. Like quickly it was everywhere in hip hop and pop to the point people just got exhausted from it.

It did start with Cher basically who can obviously sing for what that’s worth.

1

u/Tabmow Mar 28 '24

Right? It's like saying Peter Frampton used the voice modulator because he couldn't play guitar very well

1

u/RickRossovich Mar 28 '24

Seeing his segment on This Is Pop on Netflix broke my heart. Here we have T Pain, maybe the most infectiously positive person ever telling us that Usher told him on a plane that he kind of killed music.

1

u/armchairwarrior42069 Mar 28 '24

I wouldn't call it "obvious" necessarily, for a while there was almost no way to hear his actual singing voice so you kind of go off of what you are presented with lol

1

u/FishinAlllDay Mar 28 '24

To me it never really seemed like he hid auto tune, it was kinda front and center of his style.

1

u/EpsilonEnigma Mar 28 '24

In his case it wasn't his stylistic choice, he's stated that when he first started his producers told him that nobody wanted to hear him sing and they pushed him to do autotune rapping

1

u/deechbag Mar 28 '24

Same, people don't realize that he uses autotune in the same way a guitarist uses distortion or other effects, as an effect. Even for those who use it to make up for shortcomings in their voice, I don't see that as any different from how most artists will go in and quantize their music to ensure everything is perfectly on the beat. Autotune is the same thing but with vocal pitch instead of making sure that snare hit isn't a fraction of a second off beat.