The Agonist’s Vicky Psarakis Rails Against Autotune
Although Godless tried his damnedest to get The Agonist’s Vicky Psarakis to talk some smack during her interview on The MetalSucks Podcast, the vocalist would not take the bait, proving to be one of the nicest, classiest guests we’ve ever had on the program.
Psarakis did, however, take some time to discuss the music industry’s ongoning abuse of auto-tune and other modern recording tools that allow less-than-stellar musicians to sound 110% perfect. Rarely has a simpler, more articulate argument against these technologies been made:
“Everything is so over-produced that nine out of ten bands shouldn’t be doing it in the first place — they’re not good enough… because technology has developed in a way where someone can’t sing and then you just throw auto-tune on them and they’re perfect. And not only do they sound perfect, but people’s ears are conditioned to it so much that they think that something is bad when it doesn’t have auto-tune on it. Music shouldn’t be like that. I’d rather listen to something that’s imperfect but natural-sounding than something over-produced and over-tuned and just perfect.”
Psarakis continued:
“When you use auto-tune and you heavily apply it to a person’s voice, it actually affects the tone of that voice. It takes away the uniqueness, the color of someone’s voice. I don’t know if you can think of any band, for instance, where a couple of albums in [to their career] they release an album and suddenly the singer sounds a bit different, and you don’t know what it is, but they don’t sound like themselves. That’s usually because of the auto-tune. And I think that’s what bothers me — the fact that we’re correcting mistakes is okay, but when it comes to the point [of] altering a person’s performance or natural tone or color of their voice, that’s what bothers me.”
No wonder The Agonist are so popular — they’ve got the goods, and they can back it up!
Listen to our entire interview with Vicky here or below. Other topics of discussion include songwriting, stage fright, what it was like to be living in Greece during the financial crash, and much, much more.
