‘Excited’ T-Pain brings his energy and unmistakable sound to Macau
R&B singer-songwriter T-Pain is a prolific producer, collaborator and touring performer – and he’s returning to Macau to unleash his unique Auto-Tune augmented sound on fans here
The R&B singer-songwriter, who appears at Pacha Macau on December 17, is a commercial phenomenon. He’s produced more than 60 top 10 singles, 16 of them number ones, as a solo artist, producer and songwriter, including solo hits Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’), Bartender and I’m ‘ ’n Luv (Wit a Stripper), and collaborative smashes including Flo Rida’s Low, Chris Brown’s Kiss Kiss and Jamie Foxx’s Blame It.
Although his most successful songs deal mainly with partying, he’s a rather sensitive soul. He’s won two Grammies and been nominated 11 times. Forbes magazine has estimated his income as high as US$15 million a year. But it was with his popularisation as a vocal effect of the pitch-correcting software that he really stamped his mark indelibly on musical history.
Auto-Tune was launched in 1997, originally based on oil-exploration software. It adjust vocals to the nearest semitone, making it a handy way to fix less-than-perfect singing in the studio. You’ve probably been hearing it all the time for years without knowing it – indeed, as a tool to make vocalists sound like they sing better than they really do, its imperceptibility was the whole point. The sea change came when producers started to use it as a sort of vocal effects pedal, to create deliberately unnatural-sounding effects, typically moving abruptly from one tone to the next without any of the natural segue between them.
The effect was first heard in 1998 on Cher’s Believe and then, two years later, and rather more enjoyably, Daft Punk’s One More Time – but it was T-Pain who really took the ball and ran with it.