Vocoder > Auto-tune

Jazzy Jay: "Def Jam" (Def Jam, 1985)

It's vocoder, right? I don't think it's a talk box.

Shit, I'm tempted to call up Dave Tompkins right now and bug him, but I bet a lot of people do that. I just googled to see if Dave's vocoder book was out yet and found a post on Jeff Chang's blog saying it "will appear in book form early 2005." Hah. I hope the book will have an appendix detailing which records use what; in the meantime, there's a pretty good overview of different robotic voice effects on Wikipedia. For a thoughtful take on the social implications of T-Pain's use of Auto-Tune, I recommend this Slate article.

The Jazzy Jay song I posted is kind of a rip-off of the B+ (b/k/a Spyder-D) song "B-Beat Classic", which itself was a remake of Sesso Mato's "Sessomato". If you don't own "B-Beat Classic", do yourself a favor and buy a download here (and enjoy a Dave Tompkins write-up) or here or here or track down the 12", which was back in print last time I checked. If you don't like the song, we probably can't be friends.

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