Show 30 – The T-Pain effect and Condenser Mic Fallacies

This week Ryan shows us how to get the T-Pain effect with AutoTune and Jon takes a look at the Recording Engineers Handbook with some Condenser Mic Fallacies. Brace yourselves, we get a bit silly on this one.

Download Show #030

Please leave us comments if there are topics that you would like us to discuss or to let us know how we are doing. We would like to hear from you.

Links:

Auto Tune Evo – Pitch correction software
Auto Tune efx – Instant T-Pain effect
GSnap – A free Alternative to AutoTune
T-Pain and his Vocoder
I’m On A Boat ft. T-Pain
B.o.B – Auto Tune
Mock T-Pain
Cher on South Park
Auto Tuning on Vimeo

6 thoughts on “Show 30 – The T-Pain effect and Condenser Mic Fallacies

  1. Thanks for another entertaining and informative show, although the “T-Pain effect” is probably something I’ll never use.

    I bought the Recording Engineer’s Handbook a couple of years ago; at that time, I understood less than 10% of what I read. Now, I would say that I’m up to 50% comprehension. Still, a very handy reference that I reach for often.

    I have a question you might want to address on the show. I can choose to have the meters in my DAW (Sonar) show Peak, RMS, or Peak & RMS. I see that Reaper has the same choices, so I assume it’s fairly common. The question is, what is the difference between these choices, and in what situations would I benefit from using one instead of the other?

    You guys always inspire me to lay down some tracks. Thanks.

    Famous Patrick

  2. If anyone’s worried about matched mikes, consider this: Your ears aren’t even matched!!
    Don’t believe it? Try this simple test (you must have good relative pitch abilities): Get somewhere real quiet with a tuning fork (the ol’ A=440 works well). Strike the fork & listen with the fork very close to one ear. Now try the other ear. Alternate a few times as needed. What do you discover? It should be impossible.
    Still unconvinced? Just go get a run-of-the-mill hearing test. Nobody’s ears match in frequency response/sensitivity.
    I’m not sure that un-matched mics are “better”, BUT I’m definately NOT convinced that lab-matched mics make any meaningful difference. Phase, amplitude, and reasonably similar “color” are all that’s required.
    –Tubamark

    • Did you see the Historical Footnote? In the original article, the producers did not want to give up a trade secret.

      STOP PRESS! Historical Footnote

      Cher’s ‘Believe’ (Dec 1998) was the first commercial recording to feature the audible side-effects of Antares Auto-tune software used as a deliberate creative effect. The (now) highly recognisable tonal mangling occurs when the pitch correction speed is set too fast for the audio that it is processing and it became one of the most over-used production effects of the following years.

      In February 1999, when this Sound On Sound article was published, the producers of this recording were apparently so keen to maintain their ‘trade secret’ process that they were willing to attribute the effect to the (then) recently-released Digitech Talker vocoder pedal. As most people are now all-too familiar with the ‘Cher effect’, as it became known, we have maintained the article in its original form as an interesting historical footnote.

  3. OMG you’re right!!!!

    thanks to you guys, you inspired me to try to fix my broken SM57 by myself instead of sending it in…and it worked! i was so proud of myself. just needed some solder and wire. keep up the great work!

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