* Photo: Joseph Maida * From Lil Wayne's cyborg-slick singing on "Lollipop" to the Twiki-tweaked vocals of T-Pain, use of the voice-enhancing software Auto-Tune has reached a fever pitch. But it turns ...

When T-Pain and his synthesized vocals made their debut with the songs “I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” three years ago, most people dismissed the hits as novelties and expected the ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...

Auto-Tune can serve as an additive or a crutch, but it has opened the floodgates for a relentless wave of untalented goons in the mainstream. The constant Auto-Tuning of vocals begets formulated, ...

Typically, the music-streaming public remains at arm’s length when it comes to tricks and tips that artists use in the recording studio — it’s too nerdy, too complicated, and only useful to obsessives ...

Believe it or not, Cher's dance anthem "Believe" has just turned 20 years old. The song, released on Oct. 22, 1998, kicked off a Cher renaissance, cemented her role as a pop icon and popularized a ...

There are few musical technologies that are as ubiquitous, maligned and misunderstood as Antares’ Auto-Tune. What was conceived in 1997 as a discrete tool for cleaning up vocals and optimizing the ...

We did it. We were the first ones. I was talking to [producer] Mark [Taylor] about that last night when we were in the studio — about how we felt when we did it. I don’t think they called it Auto-Tune ...