Do YOU believe in life after love?

People in the world today have an exceedingly high standard of perfection. Who can really blame them though? What used to require raw talent can be compensated for through the use of technology. Auto-tune, or other pieces of technology like it, can fix an out of tune instrument. That instrument can be anything from a bass guitar to someone singing. Using in on vocals is what it is primarily used for. For those of you out there who can’t really imagine what Auto-tune sounds like, just think of that Cher song “Do You Believe in Life after Love.” That “Cher” sound is what most people refer to as auto-tune (incidentally, she uses what’s called a vocoder, not auto-tune for that effect!). They sell auto-tune units that you basically plug your mic into and it tunes you in real-time. As you sing the note, it fixes it for you!

Now, the problem with this is not that Auto-tune doesn’t have its uses, but because it is used so much our ears have become used to it. In fact, if we were to hear a professionally created recording that didn’t have every single note in-tune and on pitch, we would criticize the singer, or the group, or whatever. This translates directly to the live show… most immediately, the TV live show. You see, when we go see a rock concert, or any kind of concert, there’s a lot of stuff going on. The music is (really really) loud, there’s pyrotechnics, a light show, a crowd of thousands of people around you… all of that can make you a very forgiving listener. When you’re listening to a band or artist perform on TV however, we can be much more critical because there aren’t all those outside factors influencing our ears. We’re just sitting on our butts at home, and we hear the artist perform just as they are…. hopefully.

You see, because the record labels and artists recognize this new standard of perfection, they’ve increasingly turned to auto-tune and lip-syncing as solutions to what is a natural human flaw. People make mistakes. Period. But the problem is, everyone else in the world expects them to be perfect 100% of the time. And God forbid you mess up on national television. People are very quick to write off a band after seeing one bad performance. Anyone remember the Hoobastank performance at the VMAs a couple years back? Whoo boy…

That is why artists like Beyonce, Ashlee Simpson, Britney Spears, etc all lip-sync on live TV. They are the kind of artists (extreme pop) that can’t afford to sing like crap on national TV. Rock groups can get away with it because it can come off as attitude. Like the Foo Fighters perfomance most recently. Dave Grohl didn’t sing perfectly, but man, it effin’ rocked!

I’m not saying that everyone should lip-sing while performing, or use auto-tune live. Believe me, I’m not! All I’m saying is before you judge, try to figure out what standard of perfection you’re judging everyone by, then try to imagine yourself singing in front of 100 people, let alone 100 million. Then maybe you’d think about using auto-tune or lip-singing.