bionic wrote:The first time i heard of pro tools was for Joe Elliot on Hysteria,they put his voice through a system that alters your key if it goes off.Armaggeddon it when Joe sings high 'Are You Getting It' at the end is pro tools.Anything can be touched up if a note is out,you can use this on guitar as well.
Must admit i was not aware that the 2001 dvd was pro tooled,then out of the 4 times i have seen Augeri it would seem he only sang live once and that was at the Oakland benefit gig last Feb 05.So it is hard to judge things regarding his vocals
I always thought he did a good job in the band but he was 38 when he joined way to old to compete with Perry's vocals,at that age you voice is changing.Thats why i was always stunned at how he could sing the way he did at 48!!!....now i know why
It was not Pro Tools. Pro Tools DIDN'T EXIST when Mutt Lange and Def Leppard were recording Hysteria back in the early 80s. They may have used some kind of rack-mounted effects device... something that created a 'doubler', or something that would 'double' the vocal an octave higher.
What TNC meant by his Pro Tools comment was describing that Augeri's vox were doctored up with Pro Tools. Pro Tools is a software application created by the company Digidesign.
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm? It is basically a high-end digital recording program. Officially, it is known as a DAW: Digital Audio Workstation. Most professional musicians use Pro Tools nowadays to record their albums.
The earliest known version of Pro Tools came out in 1987, well after Def Lepp's famed album.
Anyway, there are a lot of advantages to using Pro Tools. Digital editing makes it very easy to do the things Mutt Lange and Def Leppard did in the studio, only FASTER and MORE RELIABILY. There's no questioning the art and talent of genius of producers like Mutt Lange, David Foster, Roy Thomas Baker, and others. But nowadays, with some knowledge of the program, you can digitally enahance mediocre performances into polished gems. You can use a plug-in (a program that works within Pro Tools) like AUTOTUNE to graphically edit/adjust vocal performances. You can take someone singing out of tune, and 'retune' it the way it was supposed to be done. The only problem is that you can sometimes hear a "sheen" in the vocal that the program has given it. If you are familiar with using AUTOTUNE, you would recognize it if you hear it.
For example, on Def Leppard's EUPHORIA, on the song Promises, towards the end.... right after you hear the backwards drums... Joe Elliott suddenly comes out with a really high sounding melodic burst of singing. It is way out of his vocal range, and more like something a tenor (like Peter Cetera, or Jason Scheff) would sing. It is a great example of AUTOTUNE being utilized to shape Joe's voice into a vocal performance he may have had trouble singing in the first place.
Another example of AUTOTUNE would be Cher's hit BELIEVE. In this case, it wasn't tuned specifically, but they left the 'raw' setting of AUTOTUNE as an effect. Kid Rock did the same thing on one of his huge ballads ONLY GOD KNOWS WHY, a few years ago.
So when people say it was "pro-tooled" to death, they mean that the performance was digitally enhanced to sound much better than it did originally!
Whew!!!
