T-Pain Is The King Of Auto-Tune, OK? Like, He Studied This Shit. Nobody Has Looked Into Auto-Tune Like He Has. FYI.
We’ve often heard musicians involved with the Five Percenter movement carry on about Supreme Mathematics, but never before have we heard a performer expound on the mathematics of Auto-Tune. That’s all changed now that T-Pain is on the warpath against Future (who “doesn’t know how to use Auto-Tune”) and Kanye West (who didn’t properly credit T-Pain for his influence on 808s & Heartbreak) in a new video interview with Vlad TV. Regarding the disparity between Future’s Auto-Tune expertise and his own, T-Pain explains:
I don’t think he gets the technology, but I mean, nobody does! I can firmly say that nobody has looked into Auto-Tune the way I have. You know what I’m saying? I’ve looked into Auto-Tune. I’ve literally met the inventor of Auto-Tune. I’ve talked to him about the way that Auto-Tune was invented. Auto-Tune was invented by this guy who used to be an oil digger. This guy used to worked on a oil rig, and they used to send sonar signals and tones down in the ground, and if it came back a different tone up to where your equipment was, that determines if you’ve got oil or not… He used that same math to make Auto-Tune. And it’s like you send a tone into ProTools and it sends you the right tone back. And a lot of math went into that shit and just some shit that’s more complicated — it would take us fucking a billion minutes to explain this shit to regular motherfuckers. But, like, I really studied this shit, and I know for a fact that nobody has sat down in the studio and studied this shit that much.
As for Kanye’s debt to T-Pain, the interview references a conversation in which Kanye offered vociferous praise for T-Pain’s 2005 debut Rappa Ternt Sanga:
[Kanye] said, “But what I figured out that Rappa Ternt Sanga is just a bunch of love songs with a shitload of bass in ‘em.” And I’m like, “Well, love songs is like heartbreaks and the shitload of bass is the 808s. So, you calling your album 808s & Heartbreak because you making a bunch of love songs with a shitload of bass in ‘em?” And he basically was like “Yeah, pretty much.”
T-Pain also has some choice words about the making of his 2007 Kanye collaboration “Good Life.” All in all, it’s an exhilarating six minutes. Watch the full interview below.
(via Idolator)
T-Pain’s album Stoicville: The Phoenix is due out sometime this year via RCA/Konvict/Nappy Boy.