Recording Studio Blog Archives

January 4, 2014 - Miley Cyrus and Auto Tune - Where are the Music Critics?

Did you catch Miley Cyrus and her New Year's performance on ABC the other night? Did you hear her first song "#GetItRight."? Well if you did, now you know what out-of-key vocals without auto-tune sound like! Now I don't want to unfairly trash Miley - I have tremendous respect for her and really like a lot of her songs and her vocal performances on them. And occasionally everyone hits a bad note now and then. But this performance was practically unlistenable. I was watching in a room full of people (non-musicians mind you), and every one was like, "wow - what's going on with her voice??" It was that bad. It was horrible.

In her defense I have to mention that she didn't lip-sync and performed the song live on a freezing night in front of an estimated 1 million people. So props to her for being a trooper and having the artistic integrity to perform the vocals live.

But WOW were the vocals pitchy on that song! And the only reason that I even make the effort to mention it is because it seems like no one else has - and I'm wondering why. The strongest language that a prolonged online search regarding her vocals revealed was: "things were a bit pitchy with the first song," and "sounded a bit pitchy," and "a slightly pitchy rendition."

Notice anything in-common over here? "A bit"?? "Slightly"??? Is it me or are we talking major kid-gloves over here???

Again, I have tremendous respect for Miley, but the fact that no one is mentioning that her performance on that song was absolutely awful, seems to tell me that she's got a very powerful PR machine that somehow through bribing or bullying can smooth things over in the press for her.

And on top of that, I'm wondering if somehow that PR machine can quash any negative chat in the forums. I know that there are firms that specialize in cleaning-up someone's online reputation, but can they really work that fast? For every musical artist that exists out there, the internet is usually full of THOUSANDS of people trash-talking them. But try to Google "miley cyrus" "new years eve" and you'll see, there is NOTHING out there in cyberspace remotely negative about it.

Strange no?