Morrissey's singing voice - when was it best?
- Thread starter Maurice E
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disappointed
Ewww, I'm gutted not c&p the article of the link posted in this thread
*edit*
Thank you very much Dave for finding the article.
Ewww, I'm gutted not c&p the article of the link posted in this thread
*edit*
Thank you very much Dave for finding the article.
Last edited:
D
Dave
Guest
Oct 14, 2006
Ruled By Frankenmusic
by Robert Everett-Green
The computer program that cleans up the singer's pitch is reshaping the character of pop, writes Robert Everett-Green.
I was listening to Morrissey sing Dear God Please Help Me, on his recent album Ringleader of the Tormentors, when I had one of those moments of revelation that sometimes happen in pop music. As that light, vulnerable tenor floated above the song's gliding beat, I realized that I was hearing something that has been banished from whole sectors of the recording industry: a man singing out of tune.
He's not far off the pitch, most of the time, though enough to notice if you have an ear for that sort of thing. Ine descending line sags a little each time he sings it, especially at the words "track me down," when he slides a full tone flat at the trailing end of the phrase. He goes sharp, too, pushing a bit too high each time he reaches the last and highest-pitched words of the final refrain, "but the heart feels free." At this point in the music, Ennio Morricone's orchestral arrangement has reached it's full magnificence, all the tension Morrissey sang about in the opening lines has dissipated, and you're left with the very tactile symbolism of a voice straining upwards as the heart feels its freedom.
Dear God, Please Help Me is one of the most beautiful songs of the year (also one of the most mischievous, since it portrays a sexual tryst as an encounter with divine mercy), and its flaws are part of its beauty. It might not have turned out nearly as well if Moz were up to date, and used Auto-Tune like everybody else.
Auto-Tune, in case you haven't heard, is a top-selling software program that corrects pitch for musicians who can't always do it themselves. It became headline news three years ago, when country singer Allison Moorer attached stickers on her album Miss Fortune that read: "Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch-correction [technology] was used in the making of this record."
A lot of the discussion since has focused on whether you're cheating if you use Auto-Tune, or programs like it. But at a time when people use samplers and old vinyl to make hit records without singing or playing any instrument themselves, it seems a bit quaint to say that Fatboy Slim is playing by the rules, but Paris Hilton isn't.
What matters more is what auto-tuning software is doing to musical styles and to our experience and expectations as listeners. It isn't just a tool, but an instrument that's reshaping the character of popular music, song by song.
Auto-Tune was introduced in 1997 and has become standard equipment in most recording studios. Run anyone's voice or instrument through it (one at a time - it can't tune a chord), and the program adjusts the pitch of each note to match the nearest comparable value in a preset scale. It's quick and easy to use, and if you listen to popular music, you're hearing its effects every day.
"It's on about 100 per cent of records that you hear on the radio," singer Neko Case said recently on PBS's The Tavis Smiley Show, exaggerating just a wee bit. She was trying to explain to Smiley why he had so often gone to concerts and found that the live thing (as he put it) "doesn't sound anything like the record that you fell in love with." Case told me last year that she asked the engineers at Toronto's Iguana Recording Studios, where she and Darryl Neudorf mixed her latest album, which singers coming through there still don't use the program to tweak their vocals. "They said, 'Just you and Nelly Furtado. Everyone else does,' " she said.
Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Tom Waits probably don't have much use for auto-tuning, because a ragged delivery is integral to their style. To hear one of these performers (whose careers were all well-established before Auto-Tune came along) singing perfectly in tune would be like seeing Dylan with a facelift.
Auto-tuning is audibly rampant in the R&B scene, and among young punk and emo bands. Green Day's hit single Wake Me Up When September Ends is almost a love song to pitch-correction technology. Singer Billie Joe Armstrong delivers this pop-punk ballad about insecurity and pain in an unnaturally steady stream of pitch-perfect vocal sound. It might be an organ playing, except that it's still obviously a human voice, backed by heavily distorted guitars that are also dead in tune from start to finish.
Green Day presents itself as a punk band, and punk has traditionally gone for a messed-up, do-it-yourself aesthetic that scorns overt displays of skill or polish. In that context, the perfectionism of Wake Me Up When September Ends feels like the last nail in Joe Strummer's coffin. Punk used to be about losing control and not really wanting it back; Green Day makes the genre seem as tidy as a golf green. You might say that Green Day was always headed in that direction ("They're not punk, they're plonk," said the Sex Pistols' John Lydon earlier this year), but auto-tuning may have boosted them to the summit of neatness.
American Idiot, Green Day's latest album, has sold almost seven million discs (including legal downloads) and topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The more they and other auto-tuning musicians succeed, the more people become habituated to their kind of pitch perfection. Dead-centre pitch is becoming the new norm. As it does so, a lot of popular music's expressive capacities may wither away.
Sarah Vaughan had a famously good ear, yet she purposely sang away from the centre of the pitch when the music seemed to need it. "You'll dry all my tears," she sings in Lover Man, her voice bobbing below pitch between each of the first words before landing deliberately flat on "tears." She's back in tune by the very end of the phrase, but along the way she has given the line a sexy, needy fluidity that suits the song's dreamy construction of the perfect lover.
Glenn Gould, writing about Barbra Streisand in her prime, said that her singing presented "a seemingly limitless array of available options," one of which was her constant push-pull relationship with the centre of the pitch. You could say the same thing about old-time blues singers such as Leadbelly, whose forceful rise above the "right" pitch on the phrase "your house catch afire!" is as meaningful as the bent "blue" notes of the White Stripes' recording of Little Bird. Much of the expressive power of supposedly reductive forms such as blues and rock comes from all the shade and colour lurking between the "correct" pitches, and it works on you even if you can't consciously detect the deviations.
Antares Audio Technology, which developed and sells Auto-Tune, says that its software doesn't have to strip out expressive details. Only when you put it on the fastest retune setting does it suppress all pitch variations ("the now-infamous 'Cher effect,' " to quote the Auto-Tune manual). That includes vibrato, which from a computer's perspective is just a regularized way of singing out of tune.
"An appropriately selected slow setting can leave expressive gestures intact," says the manual, citing vibrato and portamento (gliding between pitches). You can even use the program to beef up the expressive gestures, adding vibrato or changing its speed or amplitude, "to allow the creation of much more convincing vibratos." Going all the way, you can strip out every distinguishing nuance, add a completely synthetic vibrato, or rebuild from the bottom using the Physical Modeling Vocal Designer, "a radical new vocal tool" whose capacity for virtual redesign of throat, vocal cords, mouth and lips "allows subtle vocal modifications or vocal tract models well beyond limits of physical human anatomy."
Very interesting, Dr. Frankenstein; but most Auto-Tune users are looking for a shortcut, not ways to increase their labours in the studio. They want a gizmo to clean up the one or two takes they've already got, to avoid having to record a dozen more takes and maybe cut and paste between them. Noting the total absence of vibrato in the eerily well-tempered Wake Me Up When September Ends, I'm betting that Green Day ordered something close to the full Cher and called it a day.
And it doesn't stop there. Auto-tuning programs can be used in live performance (including karaoke), with no discernible sound delay. You need never hear how your favourite singer really sounds, unless they forget to switch the thing on, or stray into a situation in which it's not convenient to do so. Michael Bublé is a mediocre song interpreter, but he has a nice sound and on his recordings appears to have a flawless ear. But when he sang his single Home on last spring's Juno Awards broadcast, he was off pitch from beginning to end, and not in a good way (check out the video on YouTube.com). To judge from several other live-performance tapes, that's not unusual for him.
Maybe his fans don't notice. Maybe they do, but accept his shortcomings as part of the immediacy of live performance. I kind of like the fact that he let it all hang out at the Junos. The mask of technology slipped away, and the musician had to show what he could do, and what he couldn't.
"Sometimes on the record I hit notes a little funny," says Neko Case of her recent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, "but it's kind of like, as my friend Brian Connolly would say, 'Humans were here.' " If you want perfection, try mathematics.
Ruled By Frankenmusic
by Robert Everett-Green
The computer program that cleans up the singer's pitch is reshaping the character of pop, writes Robert Everett-Green.
I was listening to Morrissey sing Dear God Please Help Me, on his recent album Ringleader of the Tormentors, when I had one of those moments of revelation that sometimes happen in pop music. As that light, vulnerable tenor floated above the song's gliding beat, I realized that I was hearing something that has been banished from whole sectors of the recording industry: a man singing out of tune.
He's not far off the pitch, most of the time, though enough to notice if you have an ear for that sort of thing. Ine descending line sags a little each time he sings it, especially at the words "track me down," when he slides a full tone flat at the trailing end of the phrase. He goes sharp, too, pushing a bit too high each time he reaches the last and highest-pitched words of the final refrain, "but the heart feels free." At this point in the music, Ennio Morricone's orchestral arrangement has reached it's full magnificence, all the tension Morrissey sang about in the opening lines has dissipated, and you're left with the very tactile symbolism of a voice straining upwards as the heart feels its freedom.
Dear God, Please Help Me is one of the most beautiful songs of the year (also one of the most mischievous, since it portrays a sexual tryst as an encounter with divine mercy), and its flaws are part of its beauty. It might not have turned out nearly as well if Moz were up to date, and used Auto-Tune like everybody else.
Auto-Tune, in case you haven't heard, is a top-selling software program that corrects pitch for musicians who can't always do it themselves. It became headline news three years ago, when country singer Allison Moorer attached stickers on her album Miss Fortune that read: "Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch-correction [technology] was used in the making of this record."
A lot of the discussion since has focused on whether you're cheating if you use Auto-Tune, or programs like it. But at a time when people use samplers and old vinyl to make hit records without singing or playing any instrument themselves, it seems a bit quaint to say that Fatboy Slim is playing by the rules, but Paris Hilton isn't.
What matters more is what auto-tuning software is doing to musical styles and to our experience and expectations as listeners. It isn't just a tool, but an instrument that's reshaping the character of popular music, song by song.
Auto-Tune was introduced in 1997 and has become standard equipment in most recording studios. Run anyone's voice or instrument through it (one at a time - it can't tune a chord), and the program adjusts the pitch of each note to match the nearest comparable value in a preset scale. It's quick and easy to use, and if you listen to popular music, you're hearing its effects every day.
"It's on about 100 per cent of records that you hear on the radio," singer Neko Case said recently on PBS's The Tavis Smiley Show, exaggerating just a wee bit. She was trying to explain to Smiley why he had so often gone to concerts and found that the live thing (as he put it) "doesn't sound anything like the record that you fell in love with." Case told me last year that she asked the engineers at Toronto's Iguana Recording Studios, where she and Darryl Neudorf mixed her latest album, which singers coming through there still don't use the program to tweak their vocals. "They said, 'Just you and Nelly Furtado. Everyone else does,' " she said.
Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Tom Waits probably don't have much use for auto-tuning, because a ragged delivery is integral to their style. To hear one of these performers (whose careers were all well-established before Auto-Tune came along) singing perfectly in tune would be like seeing Dylan with a facelift.
Auto-tuning is audibly rampant in the R&B scene, and among young punk and emo bands. Green Day's hit single Wake Me Up When September Ends is almost a love song to pitch-correction technology. Singer Billie Joe Armstrong delivers this pop-punk ballad about insecurity and pain in an unnaturally steady stream of pitch-perfect vocal sound. It might be an organ playing, except that it's still obviously a human voice, backed by heavily distorted guitars that are also dead in tune from start to finish.
Green Day presents itself as a punk band, and punk has traditionally gone for a messed-up, do-it-yourself aesthetic that scorns overt displays of skill or polish. In that context, the perfectionism of Wake Me Up When September Ends feels like the last nail in Joe Strummer's coffin. Punk used to be about losing control and not really wanting it back; Green Day makes the genre seem as tidy as a golf green. You might say that Green Day was always headed in that direction ("They're not punk, they're plonk," said the Sex Pistols' John Lydon earlier this year), but auto-tuning may have boosted them to the summit of neatness.
American Idiot, Green Day's latest album, has sold almost seven million discs (including legal downloads) and topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The more they and other auto-tuning musicians succeed, the more people become habituated to their kind of pitch perfection. Dead-centre pitch is becoming the new norm. As it does so, a lot of popular music's expressive capacities may wither away.
Sarah Vaughan had a famously good ear, yet she purposely sang away from the centre of the pitch when the music seemed to need it. "You'll dry all my tears," she sings in Lover Man, her voice bobbing below pitch between each of the first words before landing deliberately flat on "tears." She's back in tune by the very end of the phrase, but along the way she has given the line a sexy, needy fluidity that suits the song's dreamy construction of the perfect lover.
Glenn Gould, writing about Barbra Streisand in her prime, said that her singing presented "a seemingly limitless array of available options," one of which was her constant push-pull relationship with the centre of the pitch. You could say the same thing about old-time blues singers such as Leadbelly, whose forceful rise above the "right" pitch on the phrase "your house catch afire!" is as meaningful as the bent "blue" notes of the White Stripes' recording of Little Bird. Much of the expressive power of supposedly reductive forms such as blues and rock comes from all the shade and colour lurking between the "correct" pitches, and it works on you even if you can't consciously detect the deviations.
Antares Audio Technology, which developed and sells Auto-Tune, says that its software doesn't have to strip out expressive details. Only when you put it on the fastest retune setting does it suppress all pitch variations ("the now-infamous 'Cher effect,' " to quote the Auto-Tune manual). That includes vibrato, which from a computer's perspective is just a regularized way of singing out of tune.
"An appropriately selected slow setting can leave expressive gestures intact," says the manual, citing vibrato and portamento (gliding between pitches). You can even use the program to beef up the expressive gestures, adding vibrato or changing its speed or amplitude, "to allow the creation of much more convincing vibratos." Going all the way, you can strip out every distinguishing nuance, add a completely synthetic vibrato, or rebuild from the bottom using the Physical Modeling Vocal Designer, "a radical new vocal tool" whose capacity for virtual redesign of throat, vocal cords, mouth and lips "allows subtle vocal modifications or vocal tract models well beyond limits of physical human anatomy."
Very interesting, Dr. Frankenstein; but most Auto-Tune users are looking for a shortcut, not ways to increase their labours in the studio. They want a gizmo to clean up the one or two takes they've already got, to avoid having to record a dozen more takes and maybe cut and paste between them. Noting the total absence of vibrato in the eerily well-tempered Wake Me Up When September Ends, I'm betting that Green Day ordered something close to the full Cher and called it a day.
And it doesn't stop there. Auto-tuning programs can be used in live performance (including karaoke), with no discernible sound delay. You need never hear how your favourite singer really sounds, unless they forget to switch the thing on, or stray into a situation in which it's not convenient to do so. Michael Bublé is a mediocre song interpreter, but he has a nice sound and on his recordings appears to have a flawless ear. But when he sang his single Home on last spring's Juno Awards broadcast, he was off pitch from beginning to end, and not in a good way (check out the video on YouTube.com). To judge from several other live-performance tapes, that's not unusual for him.
Maybe his fans don't notice. Maybe they do, but accept his shortcomings as part of the immediacy of live performance. I kind of like the fact that he let it all hang out at the Junos. The mask of technology slipped away, and the musician had to show what he could do, and what he couldn't.
"Sometimes on the record I hit notes a little funny," says Neko Case of her recent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, "but it's kind of like, as my friend Brian Connolly would say, 'Humans were here.' " If you want perfection, try mathematics.
Last edited by a moderator:
CrystalGeezer
My secret's my enzyme.
Interesting.
I am a Ghost
New Member
Thanks be to the living Jayziz that Morrissey would never use crap like Auto-Tune. 
D
Dave
Guest
I have listened to Neil Young for a long time and his voice has definitely changed. I think that a general rule of thumb might be that untrained rock or pop male singers lose some of the higher range as they age, but gain control and have more ability to add nuance.
Now if Morrissey is actually as far off as the article states, it's not like the musicians and the producer were unaware. (Before auto-tune another way to get perfect vocals was to sing small sections of the song repeatedly and paste the final results together for the perfect take.) If Morrissey's intention was to create a perfect vocal track he could have done it without the trademark sound of auto-tune. If you're unsure what auto-tune sounds like, the person I most associate it with is Britney Spears. If you know the song, "Oops, I did it again" you know the sound of the severe application of auto-tune.
Morrissey's heroes don't sing in tune though, for the most part. Anyone that loves New York Dolls and Patti Smith is not trying to make the perfect sanitized recording.
Anyway, that's nothing. You should hear him play 'pianer'.
Now if Morrissey is actually as far off as the article states, it's not like the musicians and the producer were unaware. (Before auto-tune another way to get perfect vocals was to sing small sections of the song repeatedly and paste the final results together for the perfect take.) If Morrissey's intention was to create a perfect vocal track he could have done it without the trademark sound of auto-tune. If you're unsure what auto-tune sounds like, the person I most associate it with is Britney Spears. If you know the song, "Oops, I did it again" you know the sound of the severe application of auto-tune.
Morrissey's heroes don't sing in tune though, for the most part. Anyone that loves New York Dolls and Patti Smith is not trying to make the perfect sanitized recording.
Anyway, that's nothing. You should hear him play 'pianer'.
dizzywhore_1804
A big-nose who knows...
Always a flawed point, Britney is widely known to use autotune it's completely expected from her (which is why when people shout "but she's not even singing" at her fans, they shrug with a "we know") - it's the people who use it for just that little push in the ballad to disguise the flaws that are really being cheeky - Britney sounding like a robot in a club dance hit, and Green Day (allegedly) using it are different, and I'd say Green Day are the ones cheating.
Also, I seem to recall that a few people on here were certain that Morrissey had used autotune on a few songs on YoR, I remember "...Not Your Birthday" being argued about at the time. Did we ever reach a conclusion? Did he ever reach the note?
D
Dave
Guest
I don't think any of them are cheating. I don't feel that way about technology. None of these people are in a contest to see who is technically perfect. The author of the article talks about Green Day, but I don't agree with his point. It's like people thinking that the Sex Pistols were supposed to be ashamed to have hit singles.
Green Day is a pop act, just like Metallica or Britney Spears.
Green Day is a pop act, just like Metallica or Britney Spears.
King Leer
Leering since '97
I thought you felt YoR was one of his best ever?
I agree his voice has never been as good as it has been from Quarry onward (despite live hiccups).
It's funny the article mentioned Dear God -- didn't someone say Birthday was auto-tuned? Is that why it was only attempted once live? Was YoR the first album Morrissey might've employed the tool, while he was playing with vocoders (I'm Okay...) and other goodies?
That Jay-Z video was good -- Harvey Keitel!
I agree his voice has never been as good as it has been from Quarry onward (despite live hiccups).
It's funny the article mentioned Dear God -- didn't someone say Birthday was auto-tuned? Is that why it was only attempted once live? Was YoR the first album Morrissey might've employed the tool, while he was playing with vocoders (I'm Okay...) and other goodies?
That Jay-Z video was good -- Harvey Keitel!
MyDoppelganger
Such a Nice Guy
I love his vocals on YoR, but I can't help but think that they're autotuned to hell. Still, I don't let that destroy my enjoyment of the music.
MindlessRuffian
Señor Member
2000-2009....
...with the exception of ROTT. f***ing hate that album.
...with the exception of ROTT. f***ing hate that album.
I find it hard to choose really. Lately he is technically adept in a way that wasn't remotely the case during the early years, and hence he sings in a different way.
I love the expressivity of the early Smiths period, the way in which he had to achieve beauty and power by other means than technically proficient vocal delivery in a conventional sense. He knew how to use discordance too.
I also love where he is now, and clearly his development as a singer has opened up new possibilities for him, musically. I doubt he could really have done "Interlude" or even "Now my heart is full" all that well in 1984. With YOR he's got a really firm grip on the music, he sings with authority, commanding the music rather than letting it wrap his voice. Almost a bit like Debbie Harry does on Parallell lines, and that is high praise indeed.
So, in the end I just couldn't vote.
cheers
I love the expressivity of the early Smiths period, the way in which he had to achieve beauty and power by other means than technically proficient vocal delivery in a conventional sense. He knew how to use discordance too.
I also love where he is now, and clearly his development as a singer has opened up new possibilities for him, musically. I doubt he could really have done "Interlude" or even "Now my heart is full" all that well in 1984. With YOR he's got a really firm grip on the music, he sings with authority, commanding the music rather than letting it wrap his voice. Almost a bit like Debbie Harry does on Parallell lines, and that is high praise indeed.
So, in the end I just couldn't vote.
cheers
bagface
Member
i would not want to hear that haha
I know what you mean, some of it does sound suspiciously perfect. But after hearing him sing several of the songs live, that suspicion withered away for my part.
cheers
MindlessRuffian
Señor Member
I love ROTT, IMHO Tony Visconti did excellent job.
The who album was disgraced with DGPHM. That song...ruined Morrissey for a while, in my eyes.
----------------
Listening to: The Smiths - William, It Was Really Nothing
via FoxyTunes
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