Jay-Z may wish “Death To Auto-Tune,” but T-Pain says he changed music with the voice-altering mechanism, which was originally designed to enhance pitchy vocals. In a recent interview with XXL, Tallahassee Pain says he “changed music completely,” but is upset at how everyone sounds with it.
“I studied my craft, and I make sure I know how it works. I know where it comes from. I knew how Auto-Tune got invented. I studied the technology of it. Everything. Then I used it,” he said, comparing it to an art form. “But everybody else is slapping it on their voice and saying they got a smash,” he adds.
Surely his studies led him to legends Teddy Riley and Roger Troutman’s use of the similar talk box machine to alter their voices for their funk and New-jack swing hits of the 80s and early 90s; they also used it for artistic expression rather than mere pitch correction.
And while, true enough, we hear more and more artists (like Future, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, etc) use the pitch-changing device for artistic expression, do you think that Pain’s use of auto-tune since his debut in the early 2000s changed the musical landscape for contemporary R&B and Hip-Hop?
Sound off below and read the full interview here.
