Mar 06, 2020 In sheer musical terms, most of Swamp Dogg's work is pure Southern soul, anchored on tight grooves and accentuated by horns, though he showed a greater dependence on drum machines and synthesizers from 1989's I Called for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock onward, and he dove headfirst into eccentric electronics on 2018's Love, Loss and Auto-Tune. Mar 08, 2010 50+ videos Play all Mix - Wilson Pickett - Mustang Sally YouTube Wild Cherry - Play That Funky Music (HQ with lyrics) - Duration: 4:15. Rewind Music Group 21,683,043 views. May 16, 2018  Find the answers for Crosswords With Friends May 16 2018 Answers. Crosswords with Friends is the newest release from Zynga. I’m sure all of you know Zynga inc which is the company that created famous game on Facebook. We will solve this crossword each day and will help you by sharing the answers online.

1. Voice Changer
2. Antares Auto-tune

Simple beats and Auto-Tuned vocals form the foundation of 808s & Heartbreak, Kanye West’s latest release. As the title implies, it’s a breakup album. But perhaps the split is deeper than even West realizes. His new sound is a bold departure from his previous efforts, but also a challenge to the parameters of what many listeners would consider hip-hop. 808s & Heartbreak doesn’t rely on an element once pervasive in the genre: samples. The album doesn’t contain any prominent samples, while West’s previous release, Graduation, featured them on 10 of its 13 tracks. He is not alone in this change: Young Jeezy’s last album, The Recession, boasts just three samples, and T.I.’s latest, Paper Trail, features only four.

The staple of hip-hop’s beatmakers for nearly 30 years, sample-based production has slowly eroded over the past decade, due to rising costs and rampant litigation. Today the average base price to clear a sample is $10,000, and the threat of lawsuits over copyright infringement looms heavy over artists and labels. High-profile rappers have become legal targets for music publishing companies, while independent MCs struggle to compete. With no standardized pricing, the prohibitive cost of samples has altered the creative approach of many hip-hop producers. The trend toward purely electronic production — synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune — has injected major stylistic changes into the genre, with producers like the Neptunes, Timbaland, and T-Pain at the forefront.

“The art form of hip-hop — the sound that attracted us to it — is diminishing,” says RZA, Wu-Tang Clan producer and MC. “It’s becoming just another form of pop music.”

Up until the early ’90s, artists sampled liberally from other musicians. But a case brought against Biz Markie in 1991 changed the rules of hip-hop and sample-based music as a whole. That year, the rapper appeared in a U.S. District Court in New York accused of copyright infringement for sampling portions of a 1972 Gilbert O’Sullivan song, “Alone Again (Naturally),” for a track on his album I Need a Haircut. Though he initially sought permission to use O’Sullivan’s original composition, Markie never received it and included the sample anyway. The rapper’s actions incited a stern response from presiding Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy.

“‘Thou shalt not steal’ has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization,” Duffy told Markie. He then issued an injunction against Cold Chillin’/Warner Bros. Records for the distribution of the album and song. “People talk about the Biz case as a turning point,” says Hope Carr, president of Clearance 13′-8″, an agency specializing in sample clearance and risk assessment. “It was enormously frustrating, because the decision didn’t really decide any actual law; the only citation was the Bible. But it certainly got a lot of people’s attention.”

Clearance agencies like Carr’s began sprouting up in the early ’90s to facilitate the proper licensing of samples and broker deals on a case-by-case basis. While there is no set formula, the length and prominence of a sample plays a major role in determining price. It also matters who is being sampled (e.g., Barry White is expensive; Stax Records artists like Wilson Pickett are more reasonable). One response to rising prices has been the increased use of interpolation, the practice of having a musician rerecord a sample to help reduce costs.

“Take the temperature of mainstream hip-hop and it’s obvious that sampling just isn’t a large part of it anymore,” says indie rapper El-P, also label chief at Definitive Jux. “And the people that do sample [are the ones who] can afford to.” The practice is, in many ways, a millionaire’s game, populated by artists like Jay-Z or (until recently) West, who can pay to play — and who can lean on fame as a bargaining chip. “When [Kanye] sampled Ray Charles for ‘Gold Digger,’ everybody was like, ‘It’s not going to get cleared,’ ” says A-Trak, West’s former DJ. “But then he called whoever’s in charge of [Charles’] estate, and it eventually got cleared.”

“In the old days, samples were $2,500 or $1,500,” says RZA. “I paid $2,000 for a Gladys Knight sample for ‘Can It Be All So Simple’ off Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). That was a big intro, and the hook was repetitious. Something like that nowadays would cost $10,000.” The problem, RZA says, is that high prices are discouraging producers like him from using samples, which in turn impacts all parties’ ability to make money.

“For Gladys Knight, even though [that sample] only cost $2,000, that was an advance,” he says. “Enter the Wu-Tang went on to sell millions of copies. She probably made about $50,000 [from publishing]. The master owner probably made a good amount of money, too.”

A sample must be cleared with two camps: those who own the master recording (typically the record company that released the song or whoever purchased the catalog) and those who own the publishing rights (usually the songwriter). “Generally, one side is going to cost about as much as the other,” says Eothen Alapatt, general manager at Stones Throw Records. Sampling a major artist like James Brown would cost about $20,000 — $10,000 for the master recording side and $10,000 for the publishing — a figure that rivals the entire budget for an album released on Stones Throw. But to not clear the samples on an album poses a high risk. Though he wouldn’t get specific, Alapatt says that Stones Throw has paid $25,000 to $35,000 to have samples cleared after the release of an album.

For a time, many producers believed that obscure artists — one-hit wonders and lesser-known jazz and soul musicians — were the gateway to cheaper samples. But as Alapatt explains, that wasn’t to be. “That was false hope in a lot of ways, because you’d be surprised who’s out there Googling themselves,” he says. “People are using the Internet to search out information that my generation thought was only possible through a secret handshake.”

Countless lawsuits over the past ten years have proven that music catalogs’ owners spend substantial resources researching and litigating against unauthorized use of their music — a process sometimes referred to as “trolling” or “sample chasing.” Bridgeport Music, a publishing company that owns the rights to the music of such groups as Parliament/ Funkadelic and the Ohio Players, has filed hundreds of copyright infringement suits. While about half of these cases were either dismissed or settled, Bridgeport scored two important victories in the past few years. In a 2004 case that focused on N.W.A’s use of a Parliament guitar sample, a judge mandated that the use of any unauthorized sample, no matter how obscured the source material, can be considered copyright infringement. And in 2006, Bridgeport and Westbound Records won $4.2 million in damages after a court ruled to stop all sales of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die album because it contained an unauthorized sample of the Ohio Players’ “Singing in the Morning.”

Some majors do appear to be embracing unauthorized sampling. Take Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk), whose latest album, Feed the animals, contains more than 300 uncleared samples. “We’ve had no issues on a copyright level so far,” says Gillis, who began selling his album in June as a pay-what-you-wish download. “People from major labels have been interested in having me collaborate [on remixes]. I think they’re starting to realize, ‘Why fight when we can work with it and make something cool?’ ”

RZA believes sampling needs to be regulated, starting with standardized fees and government oversight. Producers often have to give 50 to 100 percent of any publishing revenue to the original artist they’re sampling. RZA would like to see a new system where the publishing is equally split between the new producer and original artist, and in which session players from the initial recording even get paid again. “All this publishing was taken away from the artists,” he says, “and that kind of raped the hip- hop industry.” But not everyone in the industry shares his opinion.

“Not all samples are equal,” says Monica Corton, a vice president at Next Decade Entertainment. Corton, whose company represents catalogs from soul and R&B artists like Millie Jackson and Joe Simon, has licensed samples to Young Jeezy, Redman, and Pharoahe Monch. “Some people put the sampled work so out front that it dominates the song,” she says, “while others use a small portion that is not as evident.”

But according to Carr, dwindling profits across the industry have label executives searching for ways to maximize existing revenue sources. “Some of the majors have realized if they want to collect money on smaller things, they need to quote smaller figures [for samples],” she says. Lots of artists want to be honest about what they’re sampling, “but they can’t afford it.”

But until some sort of universal decision is made, more and more hip-hop artists will likely go the Kanye route and continue to blur the lines of traditional hip-hop by relying on electronic production. “Right now, without sampling in hip-hop,” RZA says, “it’s really a soggy-ass form of music.”

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The following sentence might come as a huge shock to teens and Millennials, so stop tweeting for a second, kids, and get prepared for a totally outlandish statement. Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers.

1. 1. Autistic ballerina dances her way into hearts

      In a popular YouTube video, the beaming little ballerina dances an entire four-minute routine seemingly perfectly, matchin...

Yes, I know. That’s hard to comprehend since the pop charts are now dominated by artists who use Auto-Tune, the software plug-in that corrects the pitch of those who can’t really cut it in the vocal department and turns their vocals into robo-voices. While everyone under 30 recovers from that revelation, here’s what I mean by “actual singers.”

Back in the day, pop artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles used to be able to record albums in just a few days. Country musicians like Patsy Cline and George Jones trudged through grueling tours in out-of-the-way rural locales yet still missed nary a note. R&B musicians like the Supremes and the Four Tops navigated their way through complex choreography but still belted out songs out like their lives depended on it.

And while today, we still have singers with massively impressive pipes, a whole lotta them could never have rocked it for real like the Motown gang. These days, artists are able to get by on looks, publicity and aid from Auto-Tune.

You can hear the robotic, processed sound of the plug-in on recent hit records like “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga and “Right Now (Na Na Na)” by Akon. It’s also heard on tracks by Kanye West, Britney Spears and Lil Wayne. When West attempted to sing “Love Lockdown” without the plug-in on “Saturday Night Live,” the results were none too impressive and got ridiculed online. You can hear 10 examples of “Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music” on Hometracked, a blog geared toward home recording enthusiasts.

Paula Abdul also uses Auto-Tune on her new song, “Here for the Music,” which she performed (i.e. lip-synched) on “American Idol” May 6. It was evident just how artificial Abdul’s vocals were when she was followed by Gwen Stefani, who gave a warts-and-all live vocal on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.”

Country and rock singers are said to use Auto-Tune to protect themselves from hitting bum notes in concert. Pop singers use it when they have a hard time singing while executing complicated dance moves (raising the question as to why they’re letting their dancing take precedence over their music). Auto-Tune has become so ubiquitous that indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to protest its overuse.

Building the ‘perfect’ beast
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.

The first of these can lead to inspiring moments, as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones noted in an essay last year. Pioneering voice tweakers include producer Quincy Jones, who punched up Lesley Gore’s vocals with double tracking on “It’s My Party,” and George Martin, who gave us a childlike sped-up John Lennon on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Later on, Peter Frampton wowed audiences with his talk box guitar effect and a decade later, vocals were being put through harmonizers to get jarring outer space effects.

Of course, to pull off any of those effects, you had still had to be able to sing. With Auto-Tune you don’t.

Then there’s the quest for perfection. By the 1970s, producers were able to edit or splice together vocal takes from various tracks and eventually they started to use hardware that corrected vocal pitch to create “perfect” performances. When the sound editing program Pro Tools became the industry norm in the 1990s, kludged-together vocal tracks became the norm.

But too much meticulousness in pop music strips away passion. And the very reason we listen to music, noted the late rock critic Lester Bangs, is to hear “passion expressed.” Auto-Tune makes people sound like robots. And if there’s no feeling, why listen at all?

Some people apparently aren’t listening anymore. Sales of major label CDs are down. But more authentic sounding music still has fans. Paste magazine recently reported that indie music is selling more, and the one area of commercial music that’s remained popular is “American Idol,” where you can’t fake it (unless you’re Paula Abdul).

The producers speak
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”

Craig Anderton, a producer and music writer, observes that Auto-Tune “gets no respect because when it’s done correctly, you can’t hear that it’s working.

“If someone uses it tastefully just to correct a few notes here and there, you don’t even know that it’s been used so it doesn’t get any props for doing a good job,” Anderton notes. “But if someone misuses it, it’s very obvious — the sound quality of the voice changes and people say ‘Oh, it’s that Auto-Tune — it’s a terrible thing that’s contributing to the decline and fall of Western music as we know it.”

One producer who dislikes Auto-Tune is Jon Tiven, who cut his musical teeth in the punk rock era with his band the Yankees, and went on to produce soul singers Wilson Pickett and Don Covey as well as Pixies founder Frank Black. Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing.

Voice Changer

“I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says. “You could sacrifice on some levels, but it would seem to me one of the first things you would really be hard pressed to sacrifice is if the person could sing in tune or not.”

Street says the like or dislike of Auto-Tune largely comes down to aesthetics, and likens people’s feelings about listening to unnatural sounds with the way some people feel about unnatural body modifications, such as breast implants.

And that makes sense. After all, today we have models and actors whose faces and bodies were never intended by nature, reality TV that’s not real, and sports “heroes” whose strength comes from pills not practice. It’s totally understandable that the commercial pop world would embrace an unnatural aesthetic. Whether audiences will someday want pop singers who are first and foremost singers remains to be seen.

Antares Auto-tune

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