By Jeff Andrew Lule
The quality of music in the country has been adversely affected by the continued use of auto-tune by artistes, Pr. George Okudi has noted.
The singer says it’s hard to find a song produced by an artiste with their own voice anymore.
Auto-tune is a software used by producers and artistes to fine-tune a voice of an artiste to sound better.
Speaking during a YouTube interview, the gospel artiste now based in the US attributed this to lazy artistes and producers.
The Wipolo hitmaker said artistes and producers use computers to do everything.
“People still listen to our music because it was original. This easy technology was not common then, and artistes used to put in the effort to train vocals, and compositions are good. That is why even today, you want to listen to Philly Lutaya’s music because it was originally done,” Okudi explained.
He noted that it is the reason why most Ugandan music doesn’t live for long.
Okudi explained that during their time, musicians used to record with cassette recorders, and everything was done manually, thus demanding perfection at every stage of production.
“There was a machine using cassette tapes with six channels. You had to budget for the lead vocalist, keyboard, adlibs, and other things within those channels. But in today’s studios, you find pro tools with over 100 channels,” he said.
Okudi described this as putting too much sugar in one cup, the reason why artistes no longer bother to perfect their works.
“Auto-tune is not supposed to be used in every song… Now, how will you sing Wipolo with auto-tune… you can’t. There are songs you can’t repeat like Thriller by the late Michael Jackson. You can’t redo it. People used to write and produce their songs with passion,” he noted.
Okudi stressed that even today, artistes like Lionel Richie can hold massive shows because of their good music.
“It is now about age, but it’s about talent… Can you compare Juliana Kanyomozi with this young generation doing karaoke? Juliana doesn’t need to auto-tune anything; no… she is an artiste. We started singing, and there was no auto-tune… So, I urge artistes that if you are using auto-tune, just use it where necessary to correct a few errors,” he added.
