Friday, August 31, 2012

Forget all those years of learning how to play the musical instrument of your choice. Just get an I Phone and a computer and soon enough you too can be a wizard at the latest trend in audio technology. Years ago there was only one way to be a popular music star. You had to some how get discovered by a record company. Nowadays you can find your fame and fortune much more directly and out of the space of your room on You Tube.
For example, there is the successful Bed Intruder song. People have been listening to this thing over 100 Million times. Its success has brought fame and fortune to Antoine Dodson and is being a product of a trend that Auto-Tunes sings the news. Antoine is an unlikely singer whose speech was turned into song. Then there are the Gregory Brothers who are four musicians from Brooklyn that made him seem to sing. The brothers Evan, Michael and Andrew plus Evan’s wife Sara are millionaires now and they are just kids that play around with a voice synthesizer
Originally, Auto-Tune was intended to correct singers when they were a little sharp or flat. But, the Gregory Brothers like to use it on the spoken word. How it works is that if you turn up Auto-Tune all the way, you force every spoken syllable onto a note in effect you make them sing. So speak something and it sounds like a pitch that rises.
The Bed Intruder song began with a very disturbing source material. It was a local news report about an attempted rape in Alabama. The victim’s brother Antoine Dodson had some choice words for the local TV cameras. He said, “He’s climbing in your window, he’s snatching your people up.” And after the Gregory Brothers get to the statement, it becomes a very tuneful musical lyric. The song is called Bed Intruder Song now on I Tunes as well. It is all about hide your wife stuff. It began an unlikely match up of TV news and popular music.
It became a huge hit on line. Over a thousand people became inspired to record their own version. You can see on I Tunes a girl and a guitarist, a brass band, a country version; all types of arrangements of a song that no one really wrote. Pretty soon people were sending the Gregory Brothers videos of other eccentric characters from the local news. Like the woman that reported on the news that she witnessed a robbery and in her description she repeatedly said she was backing up. So, thus is the popular Auto-Tune the News: I Tunes Version Backin Up Song.
Another hit was the news report of a guy who got all excited when he saw a double rainbow in Yosemite park one day. At their office in Brooklyn , NY the Gregory brothers put in some background vocals and the Songify This: Double Rainbow Song now on I Tunes is born. Today you can buy these songs from the I Tunes Store. The Gregory Brothers split the profits with their sources the news reports people including Antoine Dodson and now they are both wealthy.
All these unintentional lyricists made a lot of money for the Gregory Brothers. The Brothers took it a step further and used green screen technology which is a Hollywood kind of effect to immerse themselves comically into serious news footage. The next step is to replace all the green areas on the computer with a new background. So, what happens when you become a new popular music star the new You Tube way? You go the old way by picking up an agent, and go on tour even get a promoter and that is where the rich Gregory Brothers are now. Comedy Central even approached The Gregory Brothers about making a TV series.
You can have fun playing with this new technology too. Go to the created free I Phone App called Songify This. It turns your speech into song no voice lessons necessary. See if you have the nerve to create a song and then put it on You Tube and then hope I Tunes will sell it for you. The Bed Intruder Song alone has sold over half a million copies at $1.30 each. Do the math, that is a lot of money pouring in on just one non written song.
The brothers did not say they wanted to grow up to be a viral You Tube sensation as kids. They should have said that they hoped that in the next 20 years there will be a software developed that will help you change spoken words and then there will be a thing that will connect computers along with a video sharing site that they will be able to green screen there. Sigh! Mom and Dad wanted them to become policemen.

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