Auto Tune In Today& 39
Sep 17, 2018 In another meaning of “soul,” we could also say that Auto-Tune is the sound of blackness today, at least in its most cutting-edge forms, like trap and future-leaning R&B.
In January of 2010, Kesha Sebert, known as ‘Ke$ha’ debuted at number one on Billboard with her album, Animal. Her style is electro pop-y dance music: she alternates between rapping and singing, the choruses of her songs are typically melodic party hooks that bore deep into your brain: “Your love, your love, your love, is my drug!” And at times, her voice is so heavily processed that it sounds like a cross between a girl and a synthesizer. Much of her sound is due to the pitch correction software, Auto-Tune.
To load an ARA instance of Auto-Tune Pro, you must add it as an “Event FX” insert on a specific audio event. There are few ways to do so in Studio One. The simplest way to do this is to press and hold down the “Option / Alt” key and then clic. Nov 06, 2018 The current version of Auto-Tune is also pretty transparent but does do the quintessential Auto-Tune sound. The classic Auto-Tune, version 5.1 most notably, is really the one that we think of when we think T-Pain — because the formant shifting is the least accurate. Then there’s the question of how much abuse I want.
Sebert, whose label did not respond to a request for an interview, has built a persona as a badass wastoid, who told Rolling Stone that all male visitors to her tour bus had to submit to being photographed with their pants down. Even the bus drivers.
Yet this past November on the Today Show, the 25-year old Sebert looked vulnerable, standing awkwardly in her skimpy purple, gold, and green unitard. She was there to promote her new album, Warrior, which was supposed to reveal the authentic her.
“Was it really important to let your voice to be heard?” asked the host, Savannah Guthrie.
“Absolutely,” Sebert said, gripping the mic nervously in her fingerless black gloves.
“People think they’ve heard the Auto-Tune, they’ve heard the dance hits, but you really have a great voice, too,” said Guthrie, helpfully.
“No, I got, like, bummed out when I heard that,” said Sebert, sadly. “Because I really can sing. It’s one of the few things I can do.”
Warrior starts with a shredding electrical static noise, then comes her voice, sounding like what the Guardian called “a robo squawk devoid of all emotion.”
“That’s pitch correction software for sure,” wrote Drew Waters, Head of Studio Operations at Capitol Records, in an email. “She may be able to sing, but she or the producer chose to put her voice through Auto-Tune or a similar plug-in as an aesthetic choice.”
So much for showing the world the authentic Ke$ha.
Since rising to fame as the weird techno-warble effect in the chorus of Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe,” Auto-Tune has become bitchy shorthand for saying somebody can’t sing. But the diss isn’t fair, because everybody’s using it.
For every T-Pain — the R&B artist who uses Auto-Tune as an over-the-top aesthetic choice — there are 100 artists who are Auto-Tuned in subtler ways. Fix a little backing harmony here, bump a flat note up to diva-worthy heights there: smooth everything over so that it’s perfect. You can even use Auto-Tune live, so an artist can sing totally out of tune in concert and be corrected before their flaws ever reach the ears of an audience. (On season 7 of the UK X-Factor, it was used so excessively on contestants’ auditions that viewers got wise, and protested.)
Indeed, finding out that all the singers we listen to have been Auto-Tuned does feel like someone’s messing with us. As humans, we crave connection, not perfection. But we’re not the ones pulling the levers. What happens when an entire industry decides it’s safer to bet on the robot? Will we start to hate the sound of our own voices?
They’re all zombies!They’re all zombies!
Auto-Tune has now become bitchy shorthand for saying somebody can’t sing
Cher’s late ‘90s comeback and makeover as a gay icon can entirely be attributed to Auto-Tune, though the song's producers claimed for years that it was a Digitech Talker vocoder pedal effect. In 1998, she released the single, “Believe,” which featured a strange, robotic vocal effect on the chorus that felt fresh. It was created with Auto-Tune.
The technology, which debuted in 1997 as a plug-in for Pro Tools (the industry standard recording software), works like this: you select the key the song is in, and then Auto-Tune analyzes the singer’s vocal line, moving “wrong” notes up or down to what it guesses is the intended pitch. You can control the time it takes for the program to move the pitch: slower is more natural, faster makes the jump sudden and inhuman sounding. Cher’s producers chose the fastest possible setting, the so-called “zero” setting, for maximum pop.
“Believe” was a huge hit, but among music nerds, it was polarizing. Indie rock producer Steve Albini, who’s recorded bands like the Pixies and Nirvana, has said he thought the song was mind-numbingly awful, and was aghast to see people he respected seduced by Auto-Tune.
“One by one, I could see that my friends had gone zombie. This horrible piece of music with this ugly soon-to-be cliché was now being discussed as something that was awesome. It made my heart fall,” he told the Onion AV Club in November of 2012.
The Auto-Tune effect spread like a slow burn through the industry, especially within the R&B and dance music communities. T-Pain began Cher-style Auto-Tuning all his vocals, and a decade later, he’s still doing it.
“It’s makin’ me money, so I ain’t about to stop!” T-Pain told DJ Skee in 2008.
“It’s makin’ me money, so I ain’t about to stop!”
Kanye West did an album with it. Lady Gaga uses it. Madonna, too. Maroon 5. Even the artistically high-minded Bon Iver has dabbled. A YouTube series where TV news clips were Auto-Tuned, “Auto-Tune the News”, went viral. The glitchy Auto-Tune mode seems destined to be remembered as the “sound” of the 2000s, the way the gated snare (that dense, big, reverb-y drum sound on, say, Phil Collinssongs) is now remembered as the sound of the ‘80s.
Auto-Tune certainly isn’t the only robot voice effect to have wormed its way into pop music. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, voice synthesizer effects units became popular with a lot of bands. Most famous is the Vocoder, originally invented in the 1930s to send encoded Allied messages during WWII. Proto-techno groups like New Order and Kraftwerk (ie: “Computer World,”) embraced it. So did American early funk and hip hop groups like the Jonzun Crew.
‘70s rockers gravitated towards another effect, the talk box. Peter Frampton (listen for it on “Do you Feel Like We Do”) and Joe Walsh (used it on “Rocky Mountain Way”) liked its similar-to-a-vocoder sound. The talk box was easier to rig up than the Vocoder — you operate it via a rubber mouth tube when applying it to vocals. But it produces massive amounts of slobber. In Dave Tompkins’ book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, about the history of synthesized speech machines in the music industry, he writes that Frampton’s roadies sanitized his talk box in Remy Martin Cognac between gigs.
The use of showy effects usually have a backlash. And in the case of the Auto-Tune warble, Jay-Z struck back with the 2009 single, D.O.A., or “Death of Auto-Tune.”
I know we facing a recession
But the music y'all making going make it the great depression
All y'all lack aggression
Put your skirt back down, grow a set man
Nigga this shit violent
This is death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence
That same year, the band Death Cab for Cutie showed up at the Grammys wearing blue ribbons to raise awareness, they told MTV, about “rampant Auto-Tune abuse.”
The protests came too late, though. The lid to Pandora’s box had been lifted. Music producers everywhere were installing the software.
Everybody uses it
Everybody uses it
“I’ll be in a studio and hear a singer down the hall and she’s clearly out of tune, and she’ll do one take,” says Drew Waters of Capitol Records. That’s all she needs. Because they can fix it later, in Auto-Tune.
There is much speculation online about who does — or doesn’t — use Auto-Tune. Taylor Swift is a key target, as her terribly off-key duet with Stevie Nicks at the 2010 Grammys suggests she’s tone deaf. (Label reps said at the time something was wrong with her earpiece.) But such speculation is naïve, say the producers I talked to. “Everybody uses it,” says Filip Nikolic, singer in the LA-based band, Poolside, and a freelance music producer and studio engineer. “It saves a ton of time.”
On one end of the spectrum are people who dial up Auto-Tune to the max, a la Cher / T-Pain. On the other end are people who use it occasionally and sparingly. You can use Auto-Tune not only to pitch correct vocals, but other instruments too, and light users will tweak a note here and there if a guitar is, say, rubbing up against a vocal in a weird way.
“I’ll massage a note every once in a while, and often I won’t even tell the artist,” says Eric Drew Feldman, a San Francisco-based musician and producer who’s worked with The Polyphonic Spree and Frank Black.
But between those two extremes, you have the synthetic middle, where Auto-Tune is used to correct nearly every note, as one integral brick in a thick wall of digitally processed sound. From Justin Bieber to One Direction, from The Weeknd to Chris Brown, most pop music produced today has a slick, synth-y tone that’s partly a result of pitch correction.
However, good luck getting anybody to cop to it. Big producers like Max Martin and Dr. Luke, responsible for mega hits from artists like Ke$ha, Pink, and Kelly Clarkson, either turned me down or didn’t respond to interview requests. And you can’t really blame them.
“Do you want to talk about that effect you probably use that people equate with your client being talentless?”
Um, no thanks.
In 2009, an online petition went around protesting the overuse of Auto-Tune on the show Glee. Those producers turned down an interview, too.
The artists and producers who would talk were conflicted. One indie band, The Stepkids, had long eschewed Auto-Tune and most other modern recording technologies to make what they call “experimental soul music.” But the band recently did an about face, and Auto-Tuned their vocal harmonies on their forthcoming single, “Fading Star.”
Were they using Auto-Tune ironically or seriously? Co-frontman Jeff Gitelman said,
“Both.”
“For a long time we fought it, and we still are to a certain degree,” said Gitelman. “But attention spans are a certain way, and that’s how it is…we just wanted it to have a clean, modern sound.”
Hanging above the toilet in San Francisco’s Different Fur recording studios — where artists like the Alabama Shakes and Bobby Brown have recorded — is a clipping from Tape Op magazine that reads: “Don’t admit to Auto-Tune use or editing of drums, unless asked directly. Then admit to half as much as you really did.”
Different Fur’s producer / engineer / owner, Patrick Brown, who hung the clipping there, has recorded acts like the Morning Benders, and says many indie rock bands “come in, and first thing they say is, ‘We don’t tune anything,’” he says.
Brown is up for ditching Auto-Tune if the client really wants to, but he says most of the time, they don’t really want to. “Let’s face it, most bands are not genius.” He’ll feel them out by saying, with a wink-wink-nod-nod: “Man, that note’s really out of tune, but that was a great take.” And a lot of times they’ll tell him, go ahead, Auto-Tune it.
Marc Griffin is in the RCA-signed band 2AM Club, which has both an emcee and a singer (Griffin’s the singer.) He first got Auto-Tuned in 2008, when he recorded a demo with producer Jerry Harrison, the former keyboardist and guitarist for the Talking Heads.
“I sang the lead, then we were in the control room with the engineer, and he put ‘tune on it. Just a little. And I had perfect pitch vocals. It sounded amazing. Then we started stacking vocals on top of it, and that sounded amazing,” says Griffin.
Now, Griffin sometimes records with Auto-Tune on in real time, rather than having it applied to his vocals in post-production, a trend producers say is not unusual. This means that the artist hears the tuned version of his or her voice coming out of the monitors while singing.
“Every time you sing a note that’s not perfect, you can hear the frequencies battle with each other,” Griffin says, which sounds kind of awful, but he insists it “helps you hear what it will really sound like.”
Singer / songwriter Neko Case kvetched about these developments in an interview with online music magazine, Pitchfork. “I'm not a perfect note hitter either but I'm not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it, too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, ‘How many people don't use Auto-Tune?’ and he said, ‘You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who've never used it in here.’ Even though I'm not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It's cool that she has some integrity.”
That was 2006. This past September, Nelly Furtado released the album, The Spirit Indestructible. Its lead single is doused in massive levels of Auto-Tune.
Dr. EvilDr. Evil
Somebody once wrote on an online message board that the guy who created Auto-Tune must “hate music.” That could not be further from the truth. Its creator, Dr. Andy Hildebrand, AKA Dr. Andy, is a classically trained flautist who spent most of his youth playing professionally, in orchestras. Despite the fact that the 66-year old only recently lopped off a long, gray ponytail, he’s no hippie. He never listened to rock music of his generation.
“I was too busy practicing,” he says. “It warped me.”
The only post-Debussy artist he’s ever gotten into is Patsy Cline.
Hildebrand’s company — Antares — nestled in an anonymous looking office park in the mountains between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Coast, has only ten employees. Hildebrand invents all the products (Antares recently came out with Auto-Tune for Guitar). His wife is the CFO.
Hildebrand started his career as a geophysicist, programming digital signal processing software which helped oil companies find drilling spots. After going back to school for music composition at age 40, he discovered he could use those same algorithms for the seamless looping of digital music samples, and later for pitch correction. Auto-Tune, and Antares, were born.
Watch Diamond Factory, Anthrax Investigation, Auto-Tune, Luis... on PBS. See more from NOVA scienceNOW.
Auto-Tune isn’t the only pitch correction software, of course. Its closest competitor, Melodyne, is reputed to be more “natural” sounding. But Auto-Tune is, in the words of one producer, “the go-to if you just want to set-it-and-forget-it.”
In interviews, Hildebrand handles the question of “is Auto-Tune evil?” with characteristic dry wit. His stock answer is, “My wife wears makeup, does that make her evil?” But on the day I asked him, he answered, “I just make the car. I don’t drive it down the wrong side of the road.”
“I just make the car. I don’t drive it down the wrong side of the road.”
The T-Pains and Chers of the world are the crazy drivers, in Hildebrand’s analogy. The artists that tune with subtlety are like his wife, tasteful people looking to put their best foot forward.
Another way you could answer the question: recorded music is, by definition, artificial. The band is not singing live in your living room. Microphones project sound. Mixing, overdubbing, and multi-tracking allow instruments and voices to be recorded, edited, and manipulated separately. There are multitudes of effects, like compression, which brings down loud sounds and amplifies quiet ones, so you can hear an artist taking a breath in between words. Reverb and delay create echo effects, which can make vocals sound fuller and rounder.
When recording went from tape to digital, there were even more opportunities for effects and manipulation, and Auto-Tune is just one of many of the new tools available. Nonetheless, there are some who feel it’s a different thing. At best, unnecessary. At worst, pernicious.
“The thing is, reverb and delay always existed in the real world, by placing the artist in unique environments, so [those effects are] just mimicking reality,” says Larry Crane, the editor of music recording magazine, Tape Op, and a producer who’s recorded Elliott Smith and The Decemberists. If you sang in a cave, or some other really echo-y chamber, you’d sound like early Elvis, too. “There is nothing in the natural world that Auto-Tune is mimicking, therefore any use of it should be carefully considered.”
“I’d rather just turn the reverb up on the Fender Twin in the troubling place,” says Arizona indie rock pioneer Howe Gelb, of the band Giant Sand. He describes Auto-Tune and other correction plug-ins as “foul” in a way he can’t quite put his finger on. ”There’s something embedded in the track that tends to push my ear away.”
Lee Alexander, one time boyfriend of Norah Jones and bass player and producer for her country side project, The Little Willies, used no Auto-Tune on their two records, and says he doesn’t even own the program.
“Stuff is out of tune everywhere…that to me is the beauty of music,” he wrote in an email.
In 2000, Matt Kadane of the band The New Year, and his brother, Bubba covered Cher’s “Believe”, complete with Auto-Tune. They did it in their former Texas Slo-Core band, Bedhead. Kadane told me hated the original “Believe,” and had to be talked into covering it, but had surprisingly found that putting Auto-Tune on his vocals “added emotional weight.” He hasn’t, however, used Auto-Tune since.
“It’s one thing to make a statement with hollow, disaffected vocals, but it’s another if this is the way we’re communicating with each other,” he says.
For some people, I said, it seems that Auto-Tune is a lot like dudes and fake boobs. Some dudes see fake boobs, they know they’re fake, but they get an erection anyway. They can’t help themselves. Kadane agreed that it “can serve that function.”
“But at some point you’d say ‘that’s fucked up that I have an erection from fake boobs!’” he says. “And in the midst of experiencing that, I think ideally you have a moment that reminds you that authenticity is still possible. And thank God not everything in the world is Auto-Tuned.”
The Beatles actually suckThe Beatles actually suck
Does your brain get rewired to expect perfect pitch?
The concept of pitch needing to be “correct” is a somewhat recent construct. Cue up the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., and listen to what Mick Jagger does on “Sweet Virginia.” There are a lot of flat and sharp notes, because, well, that’s characteristic of blues singing, which is at the roots of rock and roll.
“When a (blues) singer is ‘flat’ it’s not because he’s doing it because he doesn’t know any better. It’s for inflection!” says Victor Coelho, Professor of Music at Boston University.
Blues singers have traditionally played with pitch to express feelings like longing or yearning, to punch up a nastier lyric, or make it feel dirty, he says. “The music is not just about hitting the pitch.”
Of course that style of vocal wouldn’t fly in Auto-Tune. It would get corrected. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, many of the classic artists whose voices are less than pitch perfect – they probably would be pitch corrected if they started out today.
John Parish, the UK-based producer who’s worked with PJ Harvey and Sparklehorse, says that though he uses Auto-Tune on rare occasions, he is no fan. Many of the singers he works with, Harvey in particular, have eccentric vocal styles -- he describes them as “character singers.” Using pitch correction software on them would be like trying to get Jackson Pollock to stay inside the lines.
“I can listen to something that can be really quite out of tune, and enjoy it,” says Parish. But is he a dying breed?
“That’s the kind of music that takes five listens to get really into,” says Nikolic, of Poolside. “That’s not really an option if you want to make it in pop music today. You find a really catchy hook and a production that is in no way challenging, and you just gear it up!”
If you’re of the generation raised on technology-enabled perfect pitch, does your brain get rewired to expect it? So-called “supertasters” are people who are genetically more sensitive to bitter flavors than the rest of us, and therefore can’t appreciate delicious bitter things like IPAs and arugula. Is the Auto-Tune generation likewise more sensitive to off key-ness, and thus less able to appreciate it? Some troubling signs point to ‘yes.’
“I was listening to some young people in a studio a few years ago, and they were like, ‘I don’t think The Beatles were so good,’” says producer Eric Drew Feldman. They were discussing the song “Paperback Writer.” “They’re going, ‘They were so sloppy! The harmonies are so flat!”
Just make me sound goodJust make me sound good
John Lennon famously hated his singing voice. He thought it sounded too thin, and was constantly futzing with vocal effects, like the overdriven sound on “I Am the Walrus.” I can relate. I love to sing, and in my head, I hear a soulful, husky, alto. What comes out, however, is a cross between a child in the musical Annie, and Gretchen Wilson: nasal, reedy, about as soulful as a mosquito. I’m in a band and I write all the songs, but I’m not the singer: I wouldn’t subject people to that.
Producer and Editor Larry Crane says he thinks lots of artists are basically insecure about their voices, and use Auto-Tune as a kind of protective shield.
“I’ve had people come in and say I want Auto-Tune, and I say, ‘Let’s spend some time, let’s do five vocal takes and compile the best take. Let’s put down a piano guide track. There’s a million ways to coach a vocal. Let’s try those things first,’” he says.
Recently, I went over to a couple-friend’s house with my husband, to play with Auto-Tune. The husband of the couple, Mike, had the software on his home computer – he dabbles in music production – and the idea was that we’d record a song together, then Auto-Tune it.
We looked for something with four-part harmony, so we could all sing, and for a song where the backing instrumental was available online. We settled on Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.” One by one we went into the bedroom to record our parts, with a mix of shame and titillation not unlike taking turns with a prostitute.
When we were finished, Mike played back the finished piece, without Auto-Tune. It was nerve wracking to listen to, I felt like my entire body was cringing. Although I hit the notes OK, there was something tentative and childlike about my delivery. Thank God these are my good friends, I thought. Of course they were probably all thinking the same thing about their performances, too, but in my mind, my voice was the most annoying of all, so wheedling and prissy sounding.
Then Mike Auto-Tuned two versions of our Boys II Men song: one with Cher / T-Pain style glitchy Auto-Tune, the other with “natural” sounding Auto-Tune. The exaggerated one was hilariously awesome – it sounded just like a generic R&B song.
But the second one shocked me. It sounded like us, for sure. But an idealized version of us. My husband’s gritty vocal attack was still there, but he was singing on key. And something about fine-tuning my vocals had made them sound more confident, like smoothing out a tremble in one’s speech.
The Auto-Tune or not Auto-Tune debate always seems to turn into a moralistic one, like somehow you have more integrity if you don’t use it, or only use it occasionally. But seeing how really innocuous-yet-lovely it could be, made me rethink. If I were a professional musician, would I reject the opportunity to sound, what I consider to be, “my best,” out of principle?
The answer to that is probably no. But then it gets you wondering. How many insecure artists with “annoying” voices will retune themselves before you ever have a chance to fall in love?
Video stills from:
TiK ToK by Ke$ha
Animal by Ke$ha
Believe by Cher
In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
Buy U A Drink by T-Pain
Hung Up in Glee
Big Hoops by Nelly Furtado
Piano Fire by Sparklehorse and P.J. Harvey
Imagine by John Lennon
If i were a professional musician, would I reject the opportunity to sound 'my best,' out of principal?
The King of Auto-Tune has retired his crown.
Since releasing debut album Rappa Ternt Sanga in December 2005, T-Pain has lent his digitally altered vocals to some of the biggest hits of the past decade, including solo singles and all-star collaborations with Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Chris Brown. Although he ditched the pitch-fixed sound last year for his natural singing voice, those team-ups still 'blow my mind the most: having people I grew up listening to wanting to do songs with me,' says the 30-year-old (real name: Faheem Najm).
As he readies a new album for release next year, T-Pain celebrates Rappa's 10th anniversary by breaking down some of his most beloved songs. (Warning: Some contain NSFW language.)
1. I'm Sprung
Peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in November 2005
T-Pain's debut single, Sprung, was written for his wife, Amber, whom he married in 2003 and has three children with. 'It was brand new love. It was the kind of love that makes you write a song about it.' The song itself came together quickly. 'I was experimenting with Auto-Tune at the time and I really got into it. It was fairly easy to get that done, because it was about something I am well-versed in: love.' Before T-Pain had even signed to Jive Records, 'the song was already circulating. It was kind of surprising once I found out what label money does to a song — just seeing it spread once the label got involved was amazing. It surprised me how fast it happened, but I already knew it was a good song.'
2. I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper) (feat. Mike Jones)
Peaked at No. 5 in February 2006
Luv was inspired by a night when T-Pain took his friend to a strip club for the first time. 'We got one girl to dance on him and he was just automatically trying to take her out of the club, pay for her tuition and do everything. The next couple days in the studio, everybody was still laughing about it. I started playing with GarageBand on my Mac and singing, 'I'm in love with a stripper,' and everybody was like, 'Yo, lay that down and we'll give it to (him) as a joke.' Then the label came in and we were going through some songs I had recorded. They heard the 'joke' and were like, 'This is the furthest thing from a joke. We're putting this out next week.' ' The fact that it became a hit 'threw me off. I was literally trying to make a bad song but it didn't work.'
3. Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin') (feat. Yung Joc)
Peaked at No. 1 in May 2007
'This is the first record where I was trying to make a hit song. I was going into the studio consciously like, 'What do people like talking about? They like drinking and they like drinking with girls. What do you say to a girl to get her a drink?' I really went down the list. That was the first time I had ever done that. I didn't like doing that, because that's not really making music to me — that's making hit songs to get some money real quick.' The track started simple and sparse, before he started adding harmonies and ad-libs to the verses. 'It got to where I actually liked the song. I was like, 'This is a pretty cool, dope song.' That's what really made me like it and then it became my first No. 1.'
4. Kiss Kiss, Chris Brown
Peaked at No. 1 in November 2007
Kiss' music video shot on Florida International University's University Park campus in Miami. 'It was a two-day shoot, but I was super lazy at the time, so I only showed up for one day. Just watching how they were trying to split everything into two days was pretty funny because it was quite hectic and Chris would not let up on getting what he asked for. I gained tons of respect for Chris, he was really taking charge of that whole thing.' Although Brown had already scored hits such as Yo (Excuse Me Miss) and Say Goodbye prior, 'it made me feel like Chris had grown up and was doing his thing.'
5. Good Life, Kanye West
Peaked at No. 7 in November 2007
T-Pain recorded a number of different hooks for Life, but 'it just wasn't sounding right to Kanye. He needed something different that was real anthemic and blew his mind right away. What ended up happening was, he made a composite of all the hooks that I did and made the hook out of it. Even the last part that I sing — 'Is the good life better than the life I live?' — that was one of the hooks, and he just put it at the end of the song and made it a bridge.' When it came time to shoot the music video, 'it was a completely different song. I got to the shoot and (Kanye) was like, 'Do you want to listen?' And I was like, 'No, I've heard it.' He was like, 'No, you're going to want to listen to the song again before we start.' '
6. Low, Flo Rida
Peaked at No. 1 in January 2008
Low's hook was one of many that T-Pain wrote during a one-night writing session with Atlantic Records' A&R head Mike Caren. 'He gave me a bunch of beats and I just ran down the list and did a bunch of hooks. A lot of them turned into singles for Atlantic artists,' including Flo Rida, then an up-and-coming rapper. The song's now-iconic refrain of 'Shawty had them Apple Bottom jeans / boots with the fur' was inspired, in part, by 'what all the girls were wearing. It was a rich white girl's uniform, it was so weird. Now it's like Uggs and yoga pants and Starbucks cups. It was just what I was seeing girls wear in the club and it kind of wrote itself.'
7. Got Money, Lil Wayne
Peaked at No. 10 in September 2008
Money's music video depicts a bank heist, but 'what a lot of people don't know is that Wayne was shooting two videos at once. He was shooting (the A Milli video) out on the street and then it turned into the bank video. Everything about that day was super fun, it was just a bright and sunny day.' Wayne and T-Pain are shown throwing cash throughout the video, a lot of which was real. 'I didn't feel comfortable because it wasn't mine — or maybe it was. Maybe that was my payment for the video. I asked for fake money, but they kept passing me real money, like, 'Yo, just throw this.' I was like, 'No, I'm not throwing real (expletive) money.' '
8. Blame It, Jamie Foxx
Peaked at No. 2 in May 2009
'Jamie's a crazy dope writer. A lot of people don't know that, but it's insane how good he is. He came up with the hook and wrote the verses, and sent me the song. For some reason, it took me like 20 minutes to catch the chord progression. It was weird, I didn't know how to set my Auto-Tune and I was like, 'I don't want to call and ask how he set his Auto-Tune, that would be embarrassing.' So I just went through like 20 minutes of trying to figure out how I was going to sing this thing, because I didn't want to do the same rhythm as him. I just kept the faith and hopefully I was going to stumble on one of the keys of Auto-Tune I wanted to do this in. Once I found it, I recorded my verse, sent it to him,' and Blame won a Grammy Award in 2010 for best R&B performance by a duo/group with vocals.
9. I'm on a Boat, The Lonely Island
Peaked at No. 56 in June 2009
After T-Pain appeared on Saturday Night Live in 2008, Andy Samberg's comedy trio reached out to his team about collaborating. 'They sent us the song and I didn't know what the (expletive) they were talking about. I couldn't tell if the song was serious or not, so it kind of confused me. But once they said it was a Digital Short, then of course I complied. They wrote the whole thing, I went and put my voice on it, and sent it back.' They later shot the video in Miami on a '$30 million yacht, which was pretty cool. I'll tell you what, though — it was cold as (expletive) out there. We had to do these (aerial) shots and I wish drones had been popular back then, because they used an actual helicopter and that thing was spraying so much water on us. That was probably the worst video day I've ever been through.'
10. All I Do is Win, DJ Khaled (feat. Ludacris, Snoop Dogg and Rick Ross)
Peaked at No. 24 in July 2010
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If there's one thing you should know about Khaled, it's that he's persistent. 'He won't let you not do something. If he has an idea, it's going to happen real quick and on his terms. He showed up to my studio one night and I was like, 'Man, I'm doing stuff. I could be here eating steak and lobster, but I'm actually working. Let me chill.' In the next 20 minutes, he had someone show up with a ton of steak and lobster for the whole studio. It was pretty (expletive) impressive. I was like, 'I was just trying to make a statement, but thanks. I'm going to eat it.' '
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Afterward, Khaled gave him a handful of beats to record Win's hook over, including one produced by DJ Nasty and LVM. 'I go in the booth and start doing ad-libs, and it was very confusing for him because I could hear it in my head and he couldn't. So he stopped the beat and was like, 'Yo, I don't think that's it. Let's try something else.' I was like, 'How about this? How about you get the (expletive) out of here and I'll call you when it's time to come back in.' He left, I finished the hook, and he came back in and was like, 'This is the biggest (expletive) hook of all time. This is an anthem.' '