Cher has done a lot of things. She scored her first Hot 100 chart-topper in 1965 and her last in 1999. (At 52, Cher was the oldest woman to land a #1 hit until last week, when Brenda Lee broke the record.) Cher sang backup on “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” She helped modernize the variety show in the ’70s and defied expectations in the ’80s. She won an Oscar for Best Actress. The ubiquitous robotic Auto-Tune effect? Cher did that first. But Cher is not in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and she thinks that’s some bullshit.
Oh she did. Or rather her producers did (although I’ve read they claim to have used vocoders, not pitch correction, but who knows). Just listen to basically any modern “hip-hop” and you hear that crap.
Or maybe they just listened to the Sesame Street theme song from 1972? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMDCjA9_-tM Cause Vocoder and talk box were around way before Cher and her producers. Believe was just a big hit song, nothing innovative about it, Kraftwerk had been using that king of sound almost 30 years before she did.
I’m fully aware of vocoders and talk boxes, that both work completely differently from pitch correction. The reason why people trace the roots of exaggerated pitch correction to Cher is because her song was the first (popular) one that sounded like exaggerated pitch correction and not like a vocoder or talk box. Most audio engineers I know doubt the claims that they used vocoders, but again who knows.
I would agree that autotune might have kinda change music (although when used in a deliberately exaggerated way it doesn’t sound much different from a vocoder), but to me Cher’s song is just one of the pop hits that helped popularize the effect. IMO, it’s just a very well-produced pop song, which contributed to the rise of a form of vocal processing that’s very widespread today, which is already quite a lot. But it’s not revolutionary in itself, it’s very much in keeping with all the codes of pop music. For the records, I’m actually a teacher in audio engineering at a college and Univ so I’ve been quite interested in the over-popularity of this type of audio processing in recent decades.
The point is that it was the first pop hit to use it in that way. For what that’s worth.
I agree. My point was that it didn’t “change music forever” lol.
Exaggerated pitch correction like that sounds very different from a vocoder (at least any vocoder I’ve ever heard). I’m sure there are ways to get close to that sound using a vocoder and other tools if you really try to replicate it, but there’s a reason pretty much everyone thought they used Auto-Tune even though vocoders had been around for a long time and they claimed to have used vocoders. And as it turns out, it was Auto-Tune.
And I’d argue the reason why she thinks she changed music forever (God I hope it’s not forever) is because of how widespread that kind of use of exaggerated pitch correction has become. Not that it in itself was a completely new and different thing that was completely unlike anything anyone had ever heard ever and music is now played backwards with no notes.
I read a more recent article where they discussed saying that to keep the production trick a secret. I’ll have to find the article.
Edit: not the one I was thinking of but here’s an article
Would you look at that. Just as we all suspected. I thought they didn’t want to say it was Auto-Tune because it was embarrassing.