I’m Amazing – Feross VS. Kanye West
September 6th, 2009 | 14,935 views | 16 Comments » | TweetI’ve long believed that modern hip-hop and R&B suffers from too much post-production. Average singers can wail away in front of the microphone yet sound amazing on the radio, after the post-production techs have fixed all the mistakes. This is why all the music on the radio sounds so similar — it’s all pitch-perfect.
Today, I discovered just how little talent it requires to make a modern pop song.
MacBook Pro + Built-in Mic + GarageBand + AutoTune + 1 hour =
“Amazing” by Feross |
VS. | “Amazing” by Kanye West |
Go ahead and click PLAY above to give my cover song a listen.
The signature vocal effect that you hear is produced by an audio processor called AutoTune (read more about it on Wikipedia). AutoTune is used by the music industry to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. Essentially, it allows artists to hide their mistakes.
AutoTune works by analyzing a music track’s pitches over time. It compares every note’s pitch to the musical key of the audio track (you have to tell it what key your audio track is in). Any time AutoTune sees a note that is off-key, it corrects the note by shifting it up or down to the nearest note.
However, the plugin does much more than pitch correction. It can be also used to deliberately distort vocals. When you crank up the settings to the max, you get the famous T-Pain vocal effect.
Sidenote: T-Pain wasn’t actually the first artist to use AutoTune for all his vocals, although he is certainly the most famous. AutoTune was first used by Eiffel 65 for their 1999 hit single Blue Da-Ba-Dee. (I loved this song as a kid. 
)
Auto-Tune Settings in Garageband to make the Kanye West, T-Pain Audio Effect
Keep in mind: I am not a singer and I don’t claim to have any natural singing talent. Sometimes I sing in the shower, and I did karaoke one time in high school with some friends. That is the full extent of my singing experience.
Yet, I was able to produce a decent-sounding R&B vocal track. This experiment proves, to me anyway, that anyone with average singing talent can produce a passable modern R&B song.
You should also read/watch:
Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect (Time Magazine)
Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music – 10 Examples (Hometracked)
Smoking Lettuce: Auto Tune the News #5 (YouTube)
I hope you enjoyed my song! Leave a comment!
P.S. This is my 50th blog post! I’m honestly surprised that I’ve kept it up for this long. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read my ramblings, leave a comment, and make this blog a fun project for me! It’s been really fun — here’s to the next 50 posts! 
UPDATE (Sep 23): One of my readers (titanicfreak94) sent me this message:
It’s a very common misconception that Eiffel 65 used the Autotune to create the distorted vocals of Blue, and all their other songs. The actual process they did was called Vocoding. They used a device called a Vocoder, which takes one audio signal, and morphs it to give the effects of another. For example, if they had a clip of somebody singing, they could use the vocoder to mix the voice with a synthesized sound, and the result would be a robotic-sounding voice.
I double-checked and s/he’s most certainly right. The song’s distorted vocals were indeed composed using a vocoder. Thanks anonymous tipster!
THIS IS AMAZING!!! Love it!
I admit to extensively using GarageBand’s pitch correction as well
You are AMAZING! Loved your re-make of this song! I am always amazed by what you can manage to discover and create. Keep it up and never stop learning new things.
KANYE ABOUKHADIJEH
HAHAHA why are you still a CS major!? Go visit the music department.
Pretty good, not gonna lie! However, you are definitely lacking the look! I wouldn’t buy your album! lol Jk
Much Love
Homie Jeede
Feross, it’s amazing how lame the industry’s become. Bring back real talent! Thanks for shining some light on a dark, dark time in hip-hop. We’re being fed fake superstars, we might as well be listening to Miley Cyrus.
-The Sports Informant
I’m submitting it to Digg right now. This week seems to be Kanye week on Digg, complete with lots of little mashups like this–a bunch of internet clowns forming a pigpile of agreement over what a douchebag he is.
Your post, however, is pure unadulterated ownage. Respect.
wow…you’ve come a long way since our days at geocities…this website makes me laugh and laugh. Great job man, you are getting pretty advanced…but not up to me yet….lol
Actually even b-4 the band you name in 99 there was a group called Zapp feat Roger Troutman that used auto tune and I think that was the 80′s you need to google his music and you will see he made it famous first. Tpain was the next to make it really popular.
Roger Troutman is famous for using a Talk Box. How come no one has mentioned the Cher track “do you believe in love” – that was the big first pop use of auto tune.
Few things – though I don’t disagree with you, kanye does get credit for actually writing the song. Songwriting isn’t such an easy thing to do and does require talent.
Next, I personally can’t sing at all, not even as a “passable” singer, however all these vocal technologies – auto tune, vocoding, and talk box make it possible for me to express myself lyrically in my tracks. What counts is the whole thing, the music, beats, groove, and message. If it enables more people to become “singers” then that’s great. Why should we idolize the front wo/man of a band when there’s a lot of other artistic contribution… What would U2 be w/o The Edge?
Nobody is mentioning Cher because her engineers didn’t autotune her voice – they used something called a vocoder (voice encoder), which merges two signals (for example, a synthesizer and a voice).
Hey anonymuz,
You’re wrong — Cher used Auto-Tune, not a Vocoder. Check out what Wikipedia has to say. I believe that Cher’s engineers went to great lengths to hide their use of Autotune because they wanted to keep it a secret, which is probably what is contributing to the confusion out there.
Miley Cyrus is such a talented singer. I have all of her songs.
Ferros,
Thank You for shedding bright light on how pathetic the music industry has become! Incidentally, the Kanye West song sucks! “It’s amazing” that his record company allowed him to release that garbage! I’ve downloaded so many Autotuned songs from Itunes! I wish I could find all the ones that use autotune and delete them. Sean Kingston, Jason Derulo, Jay Sean, Akon. Damn I’m pissed!
Sorry for spelling your name wrong Feross!
Feross…. You won!!