Bob Dylan may have been a poet, a 60s troubadour who influenced rock music for the next three decades, but he sure couldn’t sing. He also may have unknowingly inspired many bad singers to believe that they could do the same thing as long as they had three chords and the truth.
- Worst Auto Tune Artists 2020
- Worst Autotune Artists List
- Worst Auto Tune Artists 2019
- Worst Autotune Artists 2020
I’ve covered some off-key artists before — people who just can’t hold a tune to save their lives. But there are others who, despite singing every note on pitch and on the beat, can make cats wail, dogs howl and donkeys bray uncontrollably. They possess the talent to craft songs, play guitar/piano, and maybe even juggle, but in some cruel fate of irony, they were cursed with a voice that turns stomachs.
Derulo also relies heavily on auto-tune, an effect that some artists use to make their voices sound computerized. Although Derulo once stated, “I can actually singI don’t need auto-tune,” many people disagree. Some who have left his live performances were disappointed with his inability to sing.
Worst Auto Tune Artists 2020
They are the worst voices in rock. And I had to cut it to 10.
#10 – Chris Martin, Coldplay
Worst Autotune Artists List
- I compared the real voices of famous singers with and without autotune side by side. I compared the before and after songs with acapella, live performances.
- Worst Offenders: Kid Rock, Cher, Uncle Kracker, T-Pain. How it Caught On: Frequently mistaken for a vocoder and more commonly known as 'That Fucking Weird Computer Voice Thing,' Auto-Tune is actually a brilliant piece of software. All you have to do is tell it which notes you're trying to hit while you're singing.
At times, Martin sounds okay. But most of the time, he sounds as if he really needs to blow his nose. It’s a sinus infection, maybe, or a persistent allergy, but it’s chronic. A Neti pot would help.
Worst Auto Tune Artists 2019
#9 – Nico
I will digress for a moment here and note the lack of female artists on this list. Why is that? Why is it that male artists can sound like a giraffe in heat, but almost every female voice sounds like an angel? I guess it’s sexist, or maybe females overall have better voices than us men. With that said, I give you 1960s starlet Nico, who sounds like a guy, therefore she’s eligible for the list.
#8 – Justin Vernon, Bon Iver
Worst Autotune Artists 2020
Whenever our neighbors leave town for a few days, their dog, left outside, howls this mournful bray that lasts for minutes, trailing off in loneliness before it starts again. I imagine that this is what it’s like to be at a performance by Bon Iver, whom LA Weekly describes as “the sonic equivalent of an empty canvas tote bag.” If left alone with a Bon Iver CD playing, I might do the same thing as our neighbors’ dog.
#7 – Tom Waits
At one time, Waits had a voice that sounded like he had been through a few late night benders – raw, throaty and seasoned. Now he’s a parody of himself. The death rattle of Cookie Monster oozing up from the sewers, waiting to capture children and eat them.
#6 – Mike Love, the Beach Boys
He’s on this list mostly because of his whiny, nasally voice, which sticks out like a sore thumb in every Beach Boys song that he participated in. It’s partly because of his odd, shuffling dance movements when he sang live (to be replaced by his odd use of hand signals to explain every lyric in his later years). But it’s partly because I hate Mike Love.
#5 – The entire Gibb clan
Every damn one of them. In their natural register, they sounded like a herd of goats being slaughtered. Their upper registers break glass and make dogs cock their heads unnaturally.
#4 – Brad Roberts, Crash Test Dummies
Every time I hear a Crash Test Dummies song on the radio I dive for the power button, dial, power cord — anything to stop the foghorn voice of Brad Roberts from vibrating the speakers and my eardrums. His voice is just a gimmick — yes, it’s low. Yes, it can go even lower. But it’s so. Damn. Creepy.
#3 – Rob Thomas, Matchbox 20
Thomas represents every yawping, Pearl-Jam-wannabe alternative-rock lead singer: Someone wanting to bathe us in their masculinity by oversinging so much that it borders on shouting. Thomas takes it further by ovER eNUNciatinG EVeryTHING, as if he were to attempting to talk while chewing a bar of Laffy Taffy. The only thing I could ever decipher from the lyrics of his hit with Santana, “Smooth”(“Give me your heart, make it real / Or else forget about it”), was “Dimmy yo are effor me or es foGEDABOUDEHuT”. I got the last part right. Sort of.
#2 – Dave Matthews
The common ancestor of Chris Martin and Rob Thomas — yawping with nasal congestion.
#1 – Bob Dylan, senior citizen
The incoherent Dylan from the 1960s that we all imitate has given way to a more reedy, Waits-like voice decimated by cigarettes — as if someone with one of those electronic voice boxes tried to sing. Oh my god — It just hit me. His voice is the love child of the Bee Gees, Tom Waits and Chris Martin – bleating, rough and nasal. All of those voices encompassed into one hast be the worst of the worst voices in rock.
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In my last post, I talked about how T-Pain was the most influential artist of our generation. You may or may not have agreed but hopefully you were at least exposed to a new perspective on this topic. T-Pain essentially began the huge trend of autotune filled music that we see filling up a large part of our music (mainly hip-hop/rap) Today, I want to evaluate his influence. Has it lowered the expectations for how talented modern day artists need to be?
This is the main question that arises when people contemplate autotune’s impact on the music industry. In most cases, I don’t think autotune is actually able to override the important of actual artistic talent. An artist really does have to have a creative spark or simply talented. If this wasn’t the case, wouldn’t anyone who has a passion for music rise to stardom?
Let’s take a look at various artists in the industry. will.i.am is an interesting example. This artist’s voice is rather average (for a lack of a better term). If you have heard him without autotune, you might really think he’s just another guy singing. Not bad, but also not that good. So why is he famous? It’s his artistic talent and creativity. will.i.am has a very unique sound and vision for his music. He truly goes the extra mile to make sure that the production of all his music has a particular sound, and that the music videos for his songs are radiating a modern vibe. Take a look for yourself!
This applies to a lot of artists. Take a look at Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak. Kanye’s voice is not particularly good either, but his creativity and concepts that he brought out on this album made this a groundbreaking record. This album made Rolling Stone’s list of 40 most groundbreaking albums of al time. Autotune was used all over this album, but that didn’t necessarily reduce the creativity or artistry behind the music!
Chances are that if an artist reaches a point of popularity by using autotune (and completely lacks creativity/artistry), it is by luck and won’t last long. People easily discover “fake” artists, and love to expose them. You might remember Rebecca Black from 2011. Here’s a reminder of her work incase you forgot!
Black used autotune extensively, and her lack of true talent resulted in a complete annihilation of this song in the mainstream view. The production is also rather bad, and the autotune is not used with good synthesis. Friday was also essentially the only popular song that Rebecca Black made, and it can be seen how autotune cannot make up for a lack of artistry.
Autotune also inspired artists like Future, Desiigner, Travis Scott, Young Thug, Lil Yatchy etc. These artists along with various other’s have formed a new sound in music known as Trap. The vocals don’t sound like anything meaningful and the words are hard to discern. These lyrics are recorded over a beat with a deep moaning bass and shimmering hi-hats. This new sound has gathered a new following, and while it is gaining popularity, a majority of music listeners still disregard this music because it is “trashy” and “lacks creativity”.
But is this really talentless music? I think the idea of “talent” in music in itself is very subjective. What might sound creative and novel to one person, might sound absolutely awful to another (as seen in the case of Trap Music). When it comes to the use of autotune, it is important to draw the line between talentless music and unconventional music . Trap, for example, would fit in the category of unconventional because it is exploring a new sound that hasn’t existed until fairly recently. However, this different sound still has an authentic sense of creativity in that it is exploring a new sound. The difference still lies in that the popularity of these artists is dependent on creativity, rather than their use of autotune.
Let’s wrap all this up! Essentially, autotune has not enabled talentless artists to reach success in music. For an artists to be successful and/or pioneer in sound, he or she must depend greatly on the creative aspects of their music rather than autotune. The autotune is only ever used as something that complements the creativity.