Production Advice

First of all, let’s get this out of the way – yes, I watch X Factor. Even though I’m always banging on about authenticity, about being natural, unconventional and genuine – I’m a regular viewer.

Why ?

Mostly because I’m a parent of two highly active little boys, and at the end of a long, busy Saturday it’s pretty much all I can cope with !

But also because it’s masterful reality TV – or at least it was once. In the last couple of years the “Britain’s Got Talent” – style melodramatic music, over-cooked personal sob-stories and blatant attempted manipulation of the viewers has really started to stick in my throat. But despite myself, I still watch.

Last night however, they went too far. Several (if not all) of the acts were blatantly auto-tuned.

Utterly, extra-ordinarily so. So much so that my entirely non-geek family asked – “why does her voice sound so weird” ?

Now I’ve written about my dislike of excessive auto-tune before, so why am I bothering to comment on this now ? As several people remarked on Twitter, X Factor isn’t really a singing competition anyway, so why worry ?

Well partly because when you use strong auto-tune on someone who is singing quite badly, the Cher / Kanye West “robot” effect leaps out and slaps you in the face – at 1’16″ in the video above, for example. But mainly for the same reason I complain so bitterly about everybody using mp3 compression on all their music when there are better alternatives.

My concern is that people will start to think this is actually what music sounds like.

They’ll get disconnected from the pleasure of listening to real, live, human music. I feel the same way about “Glee” – how can a drama about the joys of singing for it’s own sake justify robbing us of a crucial element of  performance ? The laser-beam computer-tuning of the performances on that show make me wince – not least because most of the singers obviously don’t need it in the first place.

Some people might argue that out-of-tune singing is always a bad thing, but I disagree ! Some of the greatest rock and pop performances in music history are chock full of tuning problems – it doesn’t matter. It makes the person human, believable and emotional.

In the case of X-Factor, it’s a little different. It’s supposed to be a singing competition, and leaving aside a few ridiculous “John and Edward” exceptions, you need to be a damn good singer to win it. Even when someone clearly has the “X Factor” (not just Simon Cowell’s bizarre personal version of it) a few duff notes in the performance can still mean the end of the road as far as the viewing pubic are concerned.

People still have an innate understanding of what makes a great performance, and they don’t need the X Factor producers to make those judgements for them.

Using autotune when we don’t know about it makes a mockery of that.

In the past I’ve heard a few “auto-tune-y” moments on X-Factor and thought “they couldn’t possibly”, but now I’m not so sure. Auto-tune on a great performance is much harder to spot than on a dodgy example like the one above. How do we know it wasn’t used to “help” us choose the “right” winner in previous years ?

(Er – I don’t actually vote myself, but you see the point !)

There has been a huge backlash about last night’s show on Twitter and now in the mainstream media, and rightly so. Yes, X Factor is lightweight, low-value entertainment TV, and yes we all understand that the votes are heavily influenced by the personalities and the production itself, but even so – if you can’t even trust that the singing you’re listening to on a singing competition is real, then really – what’s the point ?

Edit to add – I chose the video above because the autotune is obvious, and Gama clearly gave an OK performance even without it. Some of the “commedy” auditions sound even more outrageous, though – for a nice summary and even more obviously auto-tuned X Factor videos, go here: NewsGush: Viewers Blast X Factor 2010 Autotune Deceit

Related posts:

1. How to sound like T-Pain – autotune is easy, but WHY ?