Herewith, the surprising history of pop’s favorite “new” sound.
In their history they forgot to mention the fact that vocorders have been used to make boring-ass undergound and overground dance music tracks sound way more interesting for the past 30 years. Trust me, it wasn’t Cher that discovered you could make lame girlpop sound great by over-vocoding, she just stole years of underground electronic music know-how… or rather, had a producer that had been paying attention to what people were dancing to in clubs and raves.
They were right in noting in recent years it’s made crappy tunes number one hits. In fact, the second I hear that distinctive auto-tune voice I just stop listening because nothing else worthwhile is going to happen in the song.
Of course, using Ableton Live’s built-in effects, I’ve built my own vocorder (that thank god doesn’t make me sound like Kanye or T-Bone, though that would probably make my music more popular). I think there’s also one on my Kurzweil but hell if I know how to use that shit yet. Guess I rig the live input function of that up today and see what shits out. Why not? Then I just need lyrics that don’t sound like the 5th grade poetry I write and I’m good to go for #1 hitz!
The main point, though, is once I started actually listening to music instead of being overwhelmed by the majestic (are you fucking kidding me? Chrome can’t correct the spelling ‘magestic’ to ‘majestic’ ?) warmth of the vocor-vocals, I realized that the backing tracks are some of the most boring-ass shit to ever be synthesized.