Faheem Rasheed Najm, better known as T-Pain, at his peak was one of the most influential artists in the late 2000’s. He utilized auto-tune in a way that although was used very little here and there for pitch correction before 2005, he changed the way it was used in a very drastic way, that caused the music industry to be shooken up by storm. He influenced very large named artists back then, including Kanye West with his album 808s and Heartbreak, which was completely influenced by T-Pain’s use of autotune. His usage of auto-tune caused a lot of backlash from a lot of people as well, with a lot of people saying that the way he used auto-tune was what “was wrong with music” at the time. A lot of critics still followed the philosophy of 1980s and 1990s rock music, which was supposed to be “as raw as possible”. The inclusion of auto-tune was then looked at as a complete contrast to what music was “supposed to be”. The general perception of auto-tune is that it’s this magical filter you can put on any artist, and it will make them sound good. This could not be further from the truth. In order to still sound decent with auto-tune enabled, you still have to sing relatively on pitch. T-Pain really demonstrated this aspect of it when in 2014, he appeared on NPR tiny desk and sang without autotune for the first time to the public, and completely took the world by storm with his incredible vocals. From that performance on, he really demonstrated that he never needed autotune, but rather used it to its potential as an instrument instead.
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