If the first decade of the millennium has taught us one thing about the music industry, it’s that you don’t necessarily have to be talented to be a successful musician. It used to be the case that if you were a hot babe or an exceedingly cool dude, and a good singer, then you could be a commercial success.
Case in point
Thanks to one particular trick (as if you couldn’t already predict what trick is going to be #1 when you read the headline), now all you have to be is a hot babe or a cool dude.
Ugh
… and you don’t even really have to be hot (see Pink). Musicians have been using cheap tricks for ages to mystify audiences, leading their fans to believe that they are doing something amazing. Some tricks are more apparent than others, but nearly everyone uses them regardless of their level of talent.
5. Pro Tools
Used By:
Mostly everybody since the year 2000
Mostly everybody since the year 2000
How it works:
Pro tools is a digital studio workplace program used to record and edit music. You can get it for Windows or Mac, and you can do just about anything with it. Albums back in "the day" were recorded mostly on tape, and then transferred to whatever medium was hot (vinyl, compact disks, singing telegrams). Today, most musicians record onto a hard drive using an editing program like Pro Tools.
Why is it cheap?
One essential part of recording and producing an album is the post-production phase. In this phase the producers and engineers balance the different parts of the recording (vocals, guitars and drums, for example) to ensure that the final product sounds as good as it can. With Pro Tools you can make a sloppy performance sound like a perfect recording. An out of tune singer can be pitch-corrected post-production. An off-time drummer can be tempo-corrected. Vocal harmonies can be added without even recording them. What you end up hearing is a mostly sub-par performance artificially enhanced to make the artist sound talented.
Basically, Pro Tools (and similar editing software) has made it so you don't have to put forth a good performance in the studio to generate a product that sounds pleasing to the human ear. We think that Jack White's opinion on the subject sums it up perfectly:
"I think Pro Tools is highly inappropriate to record music... It's too easy to correct mistakes, it's too easy to fix things. We hear this sort of clean, plastic perfection that's been applied to all the tracks. That is not the kind of music we grew up loving and listening to and wanting to be a part of."
"I think Pro Tools is highly inappropriate to record music... It's too easy to correct mistakes, it's too easy to fix things. We hear this sort of clean, plastic perfection that's been applied to all the tracks. That is not the kind of music we grew up loving and listening to and wanting to be a part of."
4. Drum Triggers
Used By:
Extreme metal drummers, mostly
How it works:
A drum trigger is a unit that senses vibrations, and then plays an artificial drum sound, electronically, through the PA system. You attach a sensor to the drum that you want to "trigger," and when that sensor picks up the vibration from your drum, it will trigger the module (the computer) to play a pre-recorded or artificial drum sound. Still sound confusing? Here's a long winded video example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGOFmVNiSH0.
Why is it cheap?
Drum triggers are cheap because you're basically negating the sound of your drum with an artificial sound. It almost makes more sense to just play an electronic drum pad. The accents and subtleties of an acoustic drum are lost with the use of a drum trigger; the drum trigger plays the same sound whether you hit it hard or soft. However, when Norwegian dudes playing songs about Satan (what else are you gonna write about?) are blasting away at 1 kajillion beats-per-minute, subtlety isn't really something they're going for.
A lot of drummers say that it's actually harder to play with drum triggers because doing so amplifies your mistakes. We think that that's just an excuse for weak-ass drummers that don't hit hard enough. Do you think this guy ever used drum triggers?:
This is John Bonham. If you didn't know that, then crush your ipod and start over.
He didn't use drum triggers. They weren't invented until after his death, but I choose to ignore that fact.
3. Two Handed Tapping
Used By:
Eddie Van Halen, Steve Hackett (Genesis), Kirk Hammett (Metallica), George Lynch (Dokken), K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton (Judas Priest), every dude in the 80’s
How it works:
Normally, you play the guitar by fretting with your off hand and picking with your dominant hand.
Not pictured: conventional guitar technique
With tapping, you take your dominant hand (picking hand) and forcefully fret a note (hammer-on) while quickly pulling your finger off of the fret (pull off), causing another note to be played. You repeat this process, creating a rapid-fire flurry of notes, eliminating the need to pick the string with your dominant hand.
Why is it cheap?
It makes it really easy to play a lot of notes really fast. It makes you sound fucking turbo, and it’s not very hard to do at all. One of the most famous examples of tapping is Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" solo. This solo is perfect evidence of why the technique is so cheap. At the 1:06 mark of the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULEBSxP725w), the crowd really starts getting pumped up for what is esentially the easiest part of the solo. Everyone is going crazy for Edward's impossibly fast but remarkably easy cheap trick.
No, not THAT Cheap Trick.
Now, if a guitar player uses the tapping technique, that does not mean that he's a bad guitar player. Guitarists simply started tapping because it was a relatively new technique that everyone else was using. King of asshole hotshot guitar players, Yngwie Malmstein, certainly didn’t need a new technique to make him sound faster, but he used tapping anyway just to show that he could do it too.
"Fuck it, I'm just using one hand."
When learning how to play the guitar, tapping is one of the first things you discover that makes all of your idiot friends think that you are God. Sure, you might not be able to play Nirvana's “Come as you Are” all the way through because your hand gets tired, but you can tap for a few seconds and make your dad think that shelling out $25 a week for lessons is really starting to look like a good investment. Stupid-ass dad.
2. The Talk Box
Used By:
Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Richie Sambora (Bon Jovi), Matthias Jabs (Scorpions), Joe Perry (Aerosmith), and several one-time offenders
How it works:
You run your electric guitar (or any other electric instrument for that matter) into the talk box. When you switch-on the talk box, the sound signal to your amplifier is re-routed into a plastic tube that the guitar player puts in his mouth. The plastic tube acts as a speaker, and whatever you play on the guitar is piped into your mouth. You shape your mouth to alter the frequency of the sounds coming out of the plastic tube, and your vocal mic picks up the sound which is then amplified through the public announce system.
For oral use ONLY..
Why is it cheap?
Guitar players use hundreds of different effects pedals and modifications to achieve different sounds, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. In fact, using effects pedals usually sounds awesome. However, in our opinion, the talk box is the most gratuitous effect used by guitar players. To the untrained ear, a guitar player using a talk box appears to have such control over his instrument that he is able to make his guitar talk, when in fact, he is essentially playing a fancy jaw harp.
Also known as the "Juice Harp," or "Slave Whistle."
Sure, some guitar players make it work. And those guitar players are all named Peter Frampton. To us, use of the talk box post-Frampton just sounds cheesy or forced. Not to say that Frampton is some kind of almighty guitar god (he's not), but he certainly took a sound and made it his. So to all of the aspiring Framptons out there, I say: If your guitar is not asking me if I feel like it does, then I'm not going to answer.
1. Autotune
Used By:
Cher, T-Pain, Brokencyde, Attack Attack!, Kanye West, Ke$ha, The Black Eyed Peas, Sean Kingston, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, Usher, etc.
How it Works:
Auto-tune is a phase vocoder that takes the signal of someone’s voice, and shifts whatever note the person is singing to the nearest true tone. Auto-tune recognizes whatever note the singer is singing, it determines if that note is correct, and it then shifts the note accordingly. Basically it combines the technology of a tuner and a pitch-shifter with analytical technology that recognizes notes and automatically corrects them. The end result is a perfectly in-tune vocal performance.
I suppose there are probably SOME good applications for the technology.
Why is it Cheap?
It allows you to sound like a good singer even if you are, in fact, a bad singer. Also, autotune effectively sucks the soul out of a singer's voice, turning them into a music robot; a talentless, overproduced, shitty robot. We think that it is boring that every pop and hip-hop singer sounds like they have the perfect voice. Imagine if Neil Young or Tom Petty used autotune. Part of the reason those dudes are good is that their vocals aren't perfect.
We wouldn't be annoyed by autotune so much if it wasn't so goddamned widespread. Try to listen to a commercial pop or hip-hop radio station for ten minutes without hearing autotune. You can't do it. It's like trying to get a girl to talk to you; impossible.
Oh, hi. My name is... hello? HEY! Ok, whatever, ignore me. You're probably not even really texting.
Will the music-loving public ever wise-up and reject autotune? In the mean time I guess we'll just have to get used to every pop and hip-hop singer sounding exactly the same.
L 'Chiam
