Disturbed - The Sound of Silence (vocals only)

What blows me away about this video isn’t the vocals at all. In fact, T-Pain would’ve been better in my opinion. This vocal is so buried in autotune artifacts, I couldn’t listen to the whole thing. What DOES blow me away is all the comments to the track. People are absolutely worshiping the dude and his “incredible singing ability”. No doubt, he has some power, but are they really just SO used to the sound of modern pop vocals that they don’t even recognize that it is edited to pieces?

Yeah, this autotune mania is madness. I think it’s the ‘sound of modern’ - a conscious sylistic choice by the artist/producer to sound “up to date” whether the singer needs it or not.

I was listening to the latest Green Day single - It seems Billy Joe has gone from spitting snotty nasal punk to whining emo robot over 4 on the floor kicks. The thing is, the dude can sing, so it’s obviously totally stylistic.

3 Likes

I’m pretty sure this guy can sing and I totally agree it became a stylsitic choice. The problem is that it opens doors to shitty singers and, unfortunately for us, they’ll sound good to everybodies’ ears.

2 Likes

I’m pretty sure he can too. But I’ll bet that song would be just as good (likely better) if they had left his performance alone. I agree with you. I think it (autotuning, etc) has become such a norm that it has become what is necessary for the general public to accept them as “good”.

1 Like

Just a thought - is what we’re hearing autotune artifacts, or some other processing to get the vocals out of the song. What I mean to ask is are these the vocals as they are in the song?

Sounds like it’s a bounce from the mix with just vocal track and reverb/ delay sends. It wouldn’t be possible to extract this vocal from the complete mix with this degree of precision/ clarity.

As for how it was procured, who knows? Maybe the song was delivered to mastering in stems and the vocal stem had effects on it, maybe the band wanted it out there themselves?

I think I saw this on Facebook originally, but someone else showed it to me and I think it was the Conan version. I’m not logging into to Facebook for this, but I see an Official version in YouTube as well as the Conan version. The Conan performance was very powerful, very emotional and impactful being “live”, and I was just happy to hear the guy really sing rather than screaming heavy thrash metal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but versatility is nice. :ok_hand:

I saw that Conan version too, and it was great. I totally prefer it to the other version they did.

Nothing will ever take the place of the original for me, though; this song was one of those that first woke me up to the power of music when I first heard it in 1965…

The greatest version for me, though, was Paul Simon’s solo rendition with just his guitar at the tenth anniv of 9/11. Sound quality is not great, but just watch his face…

Don’t hate me but I like that sound on the vocals. Also I’m happy if I can get away with being a rubbish singer.

This is the most “Disturbing” use of autotune I’ve heard - The Bube “live” singing the Julie London torch classic… I mean “why?”:grimacing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV-rIlw4mco

1 Like

No need to feel embarrassed. Judging by the comments that were left on that video, you are among the majority :wink:

That orchestra behind him though…

MMM DAMN GURL