There’s an experience that’s specific singing in the room with another person/people. This isn’t some like “oh kids these days will never understand how good my vinyl sounded” sort of thing. Let me explain.
There’s a thing in acoustics called beating. A tone is just a movement repeated more or less identically more than ~20 times per second, or 20 Hz. If anyone would like to hear this, Adam Neely has a great 5 minute video on it. You speed up a rhythm and a tone appears (or in this case, 3 tones). Now when you put 2 tones alongside each other, you can get a thing called beating. Usually any beating is caught up in timbre and the distance of notes. However, you can hear a very clear example of it here. If the math shit is intimidating, just power through to listen to the examples. The second audio clip is of two tones bearing against each other once every second, which means their frequencies are different by exactly 1 Hz.
So what does all this have to do with kids and pop music? Well there are neurological studies of musicians which suggest that certain brain activities synchronize between musicians who are playing together. And singing together is a good way to achieve this “locked in” feeling. However, kids aren’t naturally good at achieving it. It’s learned. If you try to match pitch with a baby who’s cooing, they will suddenly change pitch when they hear the beating of the tones. They hear the way your voices interact and react to it in their voice. This is the beginning of learning to match pitch. It involves listening. If you’ve ever sang with someone who was really off pitch and had a hard time keeping up yourself, it’s because of this. But here’s the thing. You can sing along with the radio all you want. Adele with never match pitch with you. There’s no interplay. It’s all you trying to match with her. But singing with another person in the room requires the back and forth. It’s like a real-time negotiation.
Now, comping is the practice of combining multiple takes, sometimes syllable for syllable. And we generally know what autotune is. Not the T-Pain Effect (or the Cher Effect). I’m talking about subtle pitch correction. If anyone wants to see these in action, there’s a good Roomie video showcases how powerful they are and how they can fix up even really shitty performances.
So here’s the bottom line. Your voice interacts very differently with an autotuned and comped recorded vocal than with another singer in the same room as you. Kids can get pretty far in their lives having never sang with another person in the room. You get to a certain point and you don’t even try and listen for adjustments anymore. There’s very literature on these effects, but it’s a drastic departure from the entirety of human history that’s kind of just accepted and assumed it’s not a huge deal.
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I think the autotune and comping are more about unreasonable standards for what “good” singing sounds like. These are some of the best performers in the world and we’re still providing performances that wouldn’t be possible for them to one-take or to nail in terms of pitch.
It’s the only singing to recordings that misses a key skill set. Nothing wrong with singing to recordings. That basically allows you to play with the masters in a way that isn’t accessible playing with local jam bands or whatever. But that push-and-pull of playing live with people is what’s missed.
Fwiw I played guitar in my bedroom for years before I finally played in a band and the shit I learned payed off a ton there. But it was doing DIY recordings while I wrote that really pushed my abilities and made me practice in a way that made my playing tighter. It’s such a quick feedback loop. If I play a 10 second riff, I’ll be able to hear how it sounds in context 10 seconds later. It’s hard to get more immediate than that. And I learned what it felt like when the take was good and what it felt like when the take was bad before I even played it back.
And they probably think you’re good because you are. Just putting in minimal continuous effort will almost always make you better than the vast majority of the population because most people’s idea of “dabbling” is “every few weeks I pick up a guitar and play for 30 minutes” and then everyone else just doesn’t play at all
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That’s fair. This becomes more of an issue later on. I was lucky enough for be involved in an after-school music ed program that, thanks to some organizational wins, was churning out these amazing teenage singers. And they all thought they were horrible because their near-perfect intonation wasn’t always on point and they’d spend their time watching videos of singers perform not knowing that most pop singers use autotune live or are lip syncing.
This so much. Something has been lost in this. Sorry to hear about the fraternity singers. My dad was part of one and it was the highlight of his week.