A new tool could be for the expressive, not just the lazy. That’s the read of Auto-Tune for guitar, and it makes me excited to see what people will do with it. It could be the advent of the true digital guitar.

Antares teased their efforts to bring Auto-Tune technology to guitars earlier this month, having gotten as far as working proof-of concept. (See Harmony Central’s exclusive video above, and Axetopia, Synthtopia.) I hadn’t worked out anything intelligent to say about it, perhaps because I was cowering in a corner in fear.

As a technologist, I have great respect for what Antares does, and their portfolio goes far beyond just the flagship vocal pitch correction. But suffice to say, Auto-Tune has been used in recording in some pretty unpleasant ways – the fault of the user, not the software, I’d argue. It’s regularly applied in order to suck the life out of great, perfectly-tuned singers, as well as to cover for people who can’t really sing, to the point that producers seem to not understand what the sound of a human voice is in all its complexity. (Case in point: Glee. The talented cast sounds incredible live and onstage, and like they have android stand-ins when they’re on the show. In fact, if you disagree with those uses, please – go use some of Antares’ terrific software for good, not evil, and I’ll write about it.)

Auto-Tune as a name, then, has come to symbolize a revolution, an extraordinary blockbuster of software – and the butt of a joke. So, it’s hard not to see a product called “Auto-Tune for Guitar” and carry some of that bias. Sometimes, as writers we actually need our readers to add some perspective.

Auto-Tune for Guitars could likewise be misused to smooth out some of the guitar’s natural intonation subtleties, though I think the danger is far less so than it is with the voice. But it’s more than that.

Reader Jesse Engel reflects on what it could mean. He notes that the significant advance is building the intelligence into the guitar, not just the computer, and that applications could be varied:

Don’t know if you saw this, but Antares has taken a fresh swipe at HEX guitar, putting a processor in the guitar and using it to do some more modern (Auto-Tune, emulation, etc.) processing. [Ed.: Hex refers to the practice of adding individual pick-ups to each of six strings. -PK]

The hex has been around for a while, but it’s a big deal to use it in this way for guitarists since you don’t need to try to do any polyphonic pitch recognition. Literally direct note access. Also, signals add nonlinearly, so effecting each string individually has a different sound than doing emulation on the mix.

The tech looks like it will help a lot of people fake being better than they are (especially bending to the right note), at the expense of the beautiful imperfections of great playing, but the potential of using hex pickups in these new ways is fun to think about.

The digital guitar has been a vision for a long time, from working out MIDI output to multichannel output. Gibson has been the name behind many of those efforts. Back in January 2004, Wired ran a glowing portrait of Gibson’s efforts in print:

The 100-Megabit Guitar: Gibson’s maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world. [Wired 12.1]

It’s worth reading the whole article; the technical limitations of the Gibson system immediately come to light. Suffice to say, that vision never quite came to fruition; Wired even this year claimed that the project had been killed – at least at Gibson. None other than Adrian Freed, OpenSoundControl and alternative instrument design guru at the University of California Berkeley’s CNMAT research center, led the group – he, his colleagues, and his many students go right on innovating with or without Gibson. Updated: I’m not able to find the reference for that story, which I read in print. See comments for commentary by Adrian Freed, who sees otherwise.

At the time, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, oddly speaking in the third person, pronounced, “Progress will happen. If Henry Juszkiewicz didn’t build a digital guitar, I can assure you the digital guitar would still happen.” That prediction may prove prescient.

The 2007 video below shows the debut of Gibson’s HD.6x-Pro Digital Les Paul – working with individual strings. I also saw a demo with Gibson, Intel, and Cakewalk that used each string in a surround speaker diffusion. It was a psychedelic effect, if not necessarily the most practical demo, but proof that a technology like this could have many uses.

For their part, here’s how Antares describes their technology. Notice that they aren’t only talking intonation, but other applications, as well.

Incorporating our world-renowned Auto-Tune pitch detection and manipulation along with our proprietary modeling technologies, ATG-6 is an entirely DSP-based suite of functions that offer everything you’ve always wanted from a guitar, along with capabilities you never imagined possible. From flawless intonation to astonishing tonal flexibility to alternate tunings that open up entirely new areas of inspiration and creativity, ATG-6 technology seriously expands the flexibility and range of the electric guitar while letting you continue to play your own way.

… Using our new Solid-Tune™ Intonation system, an ATG-6 equipped guitar constantly monitors the precise pitch of each individual string and makes any corrections necessary to ensure that every note of every chord and riff is always in tune, regardless of variables like finger position or pressure or physical limitations of the instrument. As a result, listening to a guitar with Solid-Tune is a revelation, offering a purity of intonation that has simply never before been possible.

Of course, Solid-Tune is smart enough to know when you want to manipulate pitch, so you can play bends and vibrato exactly as you always do. In fact, Solid-Tune Intonation makes it even easier to bend to the right pitch every time.

Antares ATG-6

Updated: Chris Randall chides me on Twitter (and I agree) for not mentioning Roland, specifically — that’s the reference above in Jesse’s from-the-hips comments to “hex” guitar. Roland has built a whole business around products that track notes played on a guitar, adding polyphonic pitch shifters, open tunings, note-by-note replacement, MIDI output, and even DSP effects processing. The difference in the Roland offering is that Roland has done all this work in a separate processing box you connect to their pick-up; Antares appears to be promising something that’s all-in-one in the guitar. And the analysis Antares is doing may well prove more sophisticated than what we’ve seen in the past in terms of distinguishing, say, a bend from different notes. That could open up additional and radically-new expressive possibilities, even if the underlying fundamental concept is more or less the same.

On the other hand, the other difference with the Roland offering relative to both Gibson’s past attempts and Antares’ upcoming ones: Roland successfully shipped and sold theirs. Until Antares does the same, advantage: Roland. We’ll be watching.

Smule, the iPhone/iPod touch development house that has released an Ocarina and a Leaf Trombone to the iPhone, has now partnered with T-Pain and Auto-Tune to bring a T-Pain-branded app to the mobile platform. I interviewed Ge Wang earlier; he gets exceptional music geek cred for the creation of the real-time synthesis language ChucK.

But this app goes further. It isn’t just called Auto-Tune for iPhone, or T-Pain Presents Auto-Tune by Smule or something like that. It actually promises to turn you into T-Pain, sort of like the toys that make you sound like Darth Vader. And that means it has exactly one application – one essential application, I’d say. It means you can do amazing covers of “I’m on a Boat.”

Something has jumped a shark here, but I’m not sure which. Maybe it jumped over the shark onto the boat.

Two more serious observations:

One, this theoretically could be a useful addition to your mobile arsenal. Mike Una uses Auto-Tune to map the continuously-varying pitch of his “Beep-It” optical Theremin to a scale. Of course, the problem is that the iPhone lacks an audio input jack, though maybe someone has an idea for how to solve that.

Two, a question: just when, exactly, will we get basic audio DSP coding on a platform that’s not the iPhone? Sony’s PSP is arguably more powerful, but requires you to take your game system into a back alley to modify it to run homebrewed software. Google’s Android has more powerful hardware in the pipeline, at least, but there’s still not really official support for running native audio code (even though that’s how the phone’s own audio system was built). People are starting to simply say “iPhone app” when what they mean is “mobile app,” and that’s a shame.

The Internet, having satisfied itself yesterday with video that faked a Beyonce who couldn’t sing, now imagines news that can. And Steve Reich is proven ahead of his time — again. (Congrats on the Pullitzer – it took them just five decades to notice!)

Yes, Antares’ Auto-Tune plug-in – now so ubiquitous in mainstream, non-audio-engineer knowledge that it’s become a generic description like “Kleenex” – can be applied to everything. (We, um, can only hope these industrious YouTubers are using legally-licensed copies – that is, until Antares releases a 99-cent iPhone app.) And so, hilariously, we imagine a world of news sung hip-hop style.

As it happens, this digital foolery does reveal something deeper. One of the joys of language in general, certainly true of English, is the degree to which musical-like inflection turns our spoken words into songs. In English, these inflections are more decorative than syntactical – good news, as unlike a language like Mandarin, the wrong inflection won’t get you in trouble. But I think a lot of the texture of the music of English-speakers – native and non-native alike – is influenced by the rhythms and melodic contours of our speech. Would Jazz have happened in a country without American English and its regional dialects? Given the sounds of “talking” trumpet mutes, my guess is it would have sounded quite different.

Poor video, but gives you the idea (where’s the official Steve Reich YouTube channel?):

The Auto-Tune News is intentionally silly, of course. But even without digital aids, people have been finding songs in recorded speech. Take composer Steve Reich: without the aid of Auto-Tune, he found surprisingly in-tune sounding melodic fragments in interview recordings for pieces like Different Trains, and later built an entire opera around the technique. (The Cave, with its accompanying video, below.)

Antares, for their part, is keeping a good sense of humor about all of this – and laughing all the way to the bank. There news stream has followed the pop culture references to their product, and even jokingly suggested they would introduce Direct Mind Access Composition Technology on April Fool’s Day. (Don’t laugh too much: I heard composer Jon Appleton, sitting alongside fellow luminaries Bob Moog, Laurie Spiegel, Morton Subotnik, and others, suggest a musical brain hat at a panel on the future of music. I’m happy to actually shut down my mind occasionally, so I don’t entirely understand the appeal.)

Previously:

AutoTune: The Song, a $99 Version (Hide!), and Some History

And here’s part I of Auto-Tuning the news. Daily Show, eat your heart out:

Thanks to decrepitude in comments. (Erm – that being the dude/dudette’s alias, not actual decrepitude in comments. That we’re not thankful for.)

Updated, for all time:

Readers are nearly 100% for judging this one. It was a fake. And the site with a really stupid name (hellohomo??) admits that it was faux.

Howard Stern Hoaxed! Beyoncé "Outtakes" Are Fake, Creator Admits [E! Online]

Wow, that may be the last time CDM links to E!

Lesson learned: yes, the Internet has the power to spread rumors at new speeds. It can also debunk them even faster. That’s something to pass along to the “get off my lawn!” crowd.

Okay, sound engineers and audiophile experts out there: it’s time to play “is this YouTube video real?” (And, heck, even if it’s not, it’s oddly hilarious.)

A recent episode of Howard Stern’s Sirius radio show claimed to expose a “leaked” feed of the raw vocals for Beyonce Knowles as she sang live on the Today Show. I could try to describe just what they sound like, but it’s really best to hear for yourself.

So, what’s the deal? You can hear the in-tune vocals in the background, as though they actually are bleeding into the mic. Does Beyonce have access to some super-secret, military grade version of Auto-Tune? Is the difference between her processed voice and her actual voice as comically radical as depicted in the ‘N Sync episode of The Simpsons?

I mean, I know – YouTube? Blogs? Howard Stern? The Internet? How much more credibility could you possibly ask for?

I’ll let you be the judge. For the record, the Today Show audience actually heard this.

Found via the brilliantly-domained Yes But No But Yes and Matt Ganucheau. YBNBY or whatever you want to call it describes the singing talentes here as “a parrot being sawed in half.” Hatebeak, an actual parrot trying to sound as though he’s being sawed in half and unofficial mascot of CDM, I’m sure you’re jealous.

Previously: the Great Van Halen Detuned Keyboard Incident.

Oh yeah, and you may want to download this video before someone has it removed.

And yes, hey, if it’s just a fake, it goes nicely with the "shreds" video meme. So bring it on.

Updated: Consensus is that it’s a beautifully-executed fake. (I’m inclined to agree – sorry, Mr. Stern.) And to think, we thought all this time the advantage of tools like Melodyne and Auto-Tune would be taking out-of-tune things and making them in-tune – ignoring the expressive potential of doing the reverse.

Britney, meanwhile? That’s another story.

Now, what I’m curious about:

Who faked this?

How did they do it?

Speculation?

This week, the Web is buzzing over the music video of AutoTune, the (parody) song.

Sadly, this video could have been so much more – not even so much as a Cher reference, really? (Cher’s producers: AutoTuning way before Kanye West, and then lying about it! Brilliant!)

For a bit of AutoTune reflection and history:

Read the 1999 Sound on Sound article in which the producers tried to fool people into thinking they used a Digitech Talker vocoder, which, come to think of it, sounds like it would have actually been a pretty decent idea, anyway. That story is now updated with the correction. I’m sure the producers are relatively sorry about it certain they can’t get away with it any more / it’s hardly a trade secret.

Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a thoughtful article on AutoTune for The New Yorker earlier this year. Best bit:

Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music.

That much is true. Of course, it begs the question: does his wife smear lipstick randomly over her forehead? Can you actually see her face? You see my point.

Perhaps feeling the pressure of free tuning and vocal plug-ins now shipping with many audio apps and DAWs, Antares have introduced Auto-Tune efx, a US$99, simplified version of the plug-in for Mac and Windows now available exclusively at Guitar Center. Oddly, a selling point is that it currently comes with a free iLok; given that it’s targeted at beginning users who likely would be shocked that they have to pay extra to use DRM added to a program, that seems like not something one would advertise. (Wow! Thanks!)

In Antares’ defense, though, no, I don’t think AutoTune is evil. In fact, I think ironically, it’s drawn attention to some of the potential fictions of recording – and, through the magic of reverse psychology, made a great case for making changes to the actual vocals and using the computer for more creative tasks rather than seeing it as a panacea for fixing human beings.

Antares also does produce software that can be used to creative effect, like the AVOX2 toolkit and its mutating effects.

To me, the most interesting (and overlooked) thing about AutoTune is its roots in seismology and geophysical data. Yep, that’s right: founder Andy Hildebrand got his start at Exxon doing things like looking for failure points in pipelines. He went on to study composition at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, and used his smarts in seismology to solve musical problems.

For more on that history, read the 1999 awards citations in the newsletter of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists [PDF], recognizing Hildebrand. (I love search engines.)

So, knock AutoTune if you like: what it demonstrates is the flexibility of digital algorithms. In fact, the beauty of computers is that they don’t worry about issues like taste or the difference between music and underground oil. And that means you can take a tool and apply it to a radically different job – giving us human beings near endless potential in how we interpret digital tools.

And that suggests that you ought to be able to use AutoTune and your voice and do something that isn’t awful at all.