T-Pain spoke in-depth on what he hears as the music industry’s misuse of auto-tune, on a HuffPost Live video segment posted on October 28.
When asked about Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, an auto-tune-heavy album which T-Pain had a hand in producing, The 29-year-old performer states reasons how he believes West misuses auto-tune.
“Kanye uses it, but he doesn’t use it correctly,” T-Pain says in the Huff Post video. “He makes great music with it, but the way that I use it and the way that I’ve shown Chris [Brown] and Jamie [Foxx] to use it, he doesn’t use it that way… He sings without it first and then he puts it on after he’s done with the vocals… You don’t know how it’s going to come out. You can’t catch your mistakes before they happen. So sometimes it gets a little bit wobbly and things like that…”
Kanye, who earlier in the week turned down a major Las Vegas residency offer, has used the vocal enhancement software heavily over the latter half of his catalogue.
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In January, T-Pain said that during the recording process of Kanye’s 808s, West made a diss track directed toward him.
“He came up with this song for me, and it wasn’t a good song,” T-Pain said at the time. “It was basically describing how wack my ideas was that I was coming up with. And he made everybody in the studio join in with him to sing like, ‘T-Pain’s shit is weak.’”
T-Pain revealed in January that he “felt unappreciated” as a result of recording the 2008 album with ‘Ye.
“I can firmly say that nobody has looked into Auto-Tune the way I have,” T-Pain said. “You know what I’m saying? I’ve looked into Auto-Tune. I literally met the inventor of Auto-Tune. I talked to him about the way that Auto-Tune was invented. Auto-Tune was invented by this guy who used to be an oil digger. This guy used to work on an oil rig and they used to send sonar signals and tones down on the ground and if it came back a different tone up to where your equipment was then that means that determines if you got oil or not…He used that same math to make Auto-Tune. And it’s like you send the tone into Pro Tools and it sends you the right tone back. And a lot of math went into that shit…I really studied this shit and I know for a fact that nobody has sat down in the studio and studied this shit that much.”
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T-Pain addresses the point further in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX from February.
“Once people find out that Auto-tune was a pitch correction software they felt like, “Oh, so you just can’t sing? So I can do that too then? It’s correcting your pitch, and it’s not that you’re actually good at anything. It’s just that there’s this thing making you perfect. So yeah you suck. You don’t even deserve that, because you can’t sing.” And you know, it’s totally not true, because all these other people are doing it. They’re not getting the Beatles records and shit. There’s a lot of other people using it, and they’re not getting any awards or any attention at all. It’s not that easy. You can use Auto-tune as much as you want to, but you still have to write a dope song. You still have to perform it well, you still have to deliver it, and you still have to have a dope beat—which I made pretty much all of them. So it’s not fair to say that I didn’t put in work, and Auto-tune is the only reason I’ve got a career. I mean, say that shit about people that’s on reality shows. They’re not contributing anything to society, and they’re famous as hell.”
RELATED:T-Pain Addresses Critical Backlash & How Auto-tune Impacts His Legacy
