now that Glee's ratings are falling- Page 2

[jsg03jd]

Posted: 10/3/11 at 9:06pm

So far I like the new season of "Glee" and they've even managed to find a way to shoot Idina Menzel where she looks quite attractive. That wasn't the case when she first appeared. Maybe it's the angle, lighting, makeup or Menzel's motherhood glow and lighter hair color. I don't know. But she looks so much better now than during her first run and I like the soapiness of her character's story as it interlocks with Noah, Quinn and Rachel's arcs.

I'm not surprised at viewer erosion. That's just a fact of life in the industry. The sophomore season suffered the expected slumps but I'm glad there's a focus now on the kids in the New Directions and annoying, extraneous characters like Lauren Zizes and Sam Evans are off the canvas.

There were attempts to bring variety shows to network television in the recent past but they failed. The closest we have now to a show that has sketches and musical acts is, I believe, "Saturday Night Live" the quality of which is very hit or miss.

I believe that "America's Got Talent" is also arguably a variety show albeit one framed as a contest.

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 10/3/11 at 9:21pm

It's true, "talent shows" (and there are a million of them) have replaced variety shows. For some reason, we can't sit still for singing unless we get to vote when it's over.
Updated On: 10/3/11 at 09:21 PM

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 10/3/11 at 10:58pm

I liked the trailer of SMASH a lot. Maybe someone who can tell better than I can; don't you think even fine singers like McPhee and Hilty are auto-tuned?
It's the state of the art, and if you're doing TV or movies, you do it cause you can.

[pinoyidol2006]

Posted: 10/3/11 at 11:42pm

I do however, Glee this season seems better than the last. I don't know why. I'm not a giant fan of the show, but the last 2 episodes were bearable for me.

[dragonlp86]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 1:08am

"Also remember SMASH is on NBC, which notorious for cancelling anything early that doesn't involve police, cops or lawyers, or isn't a hit out of the box. Smash will last it's one season and that will be it."

I thought that was FOX? /still mourning 'Firefly'...

[Pippin]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 1:20am

"I said it from the moment it premiered that it wouldn't last."

What does this even mean? If it's run for three years now, and it's currently still on, I would say it has still lasted. People think they are so clever and savvy about predicting something's staying power, but in reality, nothing lasts. So, I'm gonna say it right here and right now.....I proclaim that "The Simpsons" won't last.

[jsg03jd]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 2:31am

"I liked the trailer of SMASH a lot. Maybe someone who can tell better than I can; don't you think even fine singers like McPhee and Hilty are auto-tuned?
It's the state of the art, and if you're doing TV or movies, you do it cause you can."

Practically every recording is touched up in the studio. I believe the producers of the OBC recording of "Legally Blonde" had to use Pro Tools because Laura Bell Bundy just could not hit that one money note for the closer of Act 1.

Even classically trained singers' recordings get touched up be it with extra reverb or some other bell and whistle.

And today's audiences demand a smoothed out sound from anything they hear from their High Def entertainment equipment. So programs like Antares's Auto-Tune or Celemony's Melodyne, which is supposedly better, are widely used in the recording industry and in shows like "Glee." I'm sure "Smash" will be using these applications as well when recording their music.

[Leonardo2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 5:11am

I'm so glad this thread exists.

When the Glee pilot aired, I thought it was the funniest thing on television (even though it was a musical re-hash of Ryan Murphy's previous WB show, Popular). It was a total, politically INcorrect, over-the-top farce. It's been downhill ever since. It really went into the crapper when it started becoming 'serious' and self-important, taking the things about characters we were laughing at and turning them into serious issues. Murphy's spat with Kings of Leon, saying they're inspiring 7-year olds and KOL should let Murphy do whatever he wants with their music (throwing in a few F-bombs along the way) when the episode that week talked about two characters scissoring was a bit rich. I also found that the one gay character was a total stereotype (which worked when it was a farce but fell flat when the show became 'serious')who let himself be bullied right out of school to another where he continued to play second fiddle to a better looking (and straighter acting)character was a bit anti-message, not to mention the lesbian character too ashamed of her lesbianism. And I got really tired of the laziness of incorporating songs into the show by having choir practice and everyone putting their problems aside to spontaneously be happy and dance around the room while one character sings like it was the best thing they ever heard.

For me, it's come to the point where just looking at the cast makes me want to punch something (Lea Michelle maybe?) I stopped watching, and no famous guest star will convince me to tune in again.

[random person 112]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 6:37am

Frankly i find saying 'tasteful autotune' an oxymoron. Either acknowledge the fault of having autotune and admit it's not a big deal or cry about it in the corner. Second let's the be honest the show verred off realism the minute morrison and his barely tolerable character started heading the glee club i see rewrite the thing with bernadette peters in his slot would be much more appealing.

[madbrian]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:41am

If only Glee were as entertaining as this thread...

Regarding the autotune, the Glee performances have been mechanized to the point where the voice is just about lost. While I'm sure the Smash performances are 'cleaned up' to some extent, in the trailer they still sound like human, theatrical voices.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:55am

'"Also remember SMASH is on NBC, which notorious for cancelling anything early that doesn't involve police, cops or lawyers, or isn't a hit out of the box. Smash will last it's one season and that will be it."

I thought that was FOX? /still mourning 'Firefly'...'

CBS is the procedial drama network, NBC actually sticks to some of its shows even when they aint pulling in the demo or ratings (look at 30 Rock). NBC has just said its sticking behind Playboy Club or Free Agents, and they have both tanked

[beensince1987]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 9:04am

I will try watching Smash if everyone sounds different (you can understand who's singing without watching a screen). I cannot tell difference among boys' voices besides that girly boy and one in a wheelchair.

Everyone (specially regular folks in States) will see Smash as second banana after Glee, not sure it lasts longer than 1 season, depends on rating I guess.

[broadwaybabywannabe]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 11:43am

not so fast here...GLEE was ranked the 14th highest program in ratings with 18-49 year old viewers this past week:
14 - Glee FOX 3.7 - 4,710

the "old" girl ain't dead yet, no matter how dead you may think or want it to be...

[Kad]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 12:12pm

Glee's not going anywhere anytime soon, but I think it's overestimated how much the tweenage fanbase can be loyal to something. It's a notoriously fickle age bracket- something will be wildly popular for a while and then be dropped.

[temms]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 1:35pm

Every recording released today uses Autotune. All of them. Every last one. If you were the one album that didn't use it, it would be noticed how bad the intonation is.

Many singers/artists insist that they don't use autotune. They are not, to be technical, lying. That's honestly what they believe. But it's not true.

I did my Masters in Sound Engineering and we actually discussed this in one recording class - if a singer asks you if you autotuned a track, you look them in the eye and say "Of course I didn't! I don't need to autotune you, you sing in tune." You always autotune them anyway when they're not looking.

If the singer happens to notice - "Hey, that note sounds different, did you do something to it?" you say, "I actually noticed that you hit that note better in a different take so I flew it in."

If a singer wants you to autotune them, then you can throw this whole charade out the window and do it. But singers tend to be very sensitive about it, so the best thing is for the engineer to lie and say they're not using it and then go ahead and do it when the singer isn't in the room. If it's done right, nobody notices and it sounds like they just sang it in tune.

"Glee" overdoes it for the pop effect, but trust me, every recording you hear has had some pitch adjustment even if the only people who know for sure are the producer and engineer.

It's like photo retouching. It's done on every photo that gets released publicly.

[dragonlp86]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 1:56pm

"NBC actually sticks to some of its shows even when they aint pulling in the demo or ratings (look at 30 Rock). NBC has just said its sticking behind Playboy Club or Free Agents, and they have both tanked."

They did right by 30 Rock, sticking with it (LOVE that show). They did just cancel Playboy Club though, so they're only willing to stick with a project so much.

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 3:36pm

Thank you, temms. I haven't recorded anything since autotune became popular and I'm not entirely clear on the concept.

I hope you won't mind a couple of questions if they can be answered simply.

I'm not really clear on how autotune works. Does autotune know the 8-tone scale and automatically adjust to one of those pitches? If a singer lands in between two notes, how does autotune know where to go?

What does it do with note-flattening and crooning and the other various effects that characterize different styles of singing?

Is autotune used live as well as in recording studios? (One of the Glee kids said they had to do their concerts without autotune, but then I've also heard that Whitney Houston has used it "live" for years.)

If there are no simple answers to my questions, please feel free to send me to Wiki.

[temms]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 4:17pm

Autotune - forgive me if I get a little scienc-y, here.

Sounds is, in essence, a disruption in air pressure. There are all kinds of disruptions in air pressure happening around us all the time, from weather patterns all the way down to cellular divisions.

Our ears are really just machines designed to absorb pressure changes that are a certain type - the outer ear is designed to absorb the pressure waves, and then little hairs inside our ear (called the "pinna") are stimulated. Each individual pinna is wired to the brain and decodes the pressure into brain wave information that we know as sound.

Musical sound is pressure changes that happen "periodically" - that is to say, they are a predictable pattern that repeats. When we speak of tuning an instrument to "A440", that means the pressure disruption repeats 440 times a second. The faster and smaller the waveform, the higher the pitch. The slower and bigger the waveform, the lower. Think of a piccolo compared to a tuba. The piccolo produces waves that are small and fast (and thus high pitch) while the Tuba makes wave that are big and slow (and thus low pitch.)

So, if a singer or instrumentalist is out of tune, essentially the "frequency" of the pattern is either too fast (making it too high) or too slow (making it too low.)

Autotune can digitally adjust the speed of the waveform (i.e. the pressure change) in order to make it slightly higher or slightly lower.

The way it does this is that it has a set of reference frequencies. Autotune knows that an A is supposed to have 440 cycles per second. If autotune is turned on, it will analyze the recorded sound, if it finds that the pressure is changing more than 440 times a second or less, it will adjust it so that it is in tune.

Now, you can set the Autotune to be very harsh, or very light. In pop production, the tendency is to set it very tightly to the pitches. In more classical/vocal recordings, it is usually not set quite so tight so there is a little bit of natural give and take with the pitch, as in natural singing.

Cher's "Believe" is an example of AutoTune at its peak - what it's doing is, every note that is being sung, it's analyzing what note in the scale it's closest to and aggresively changing the pitch of all of those notes to exactly their specific pitch.

So, if you sing a slide down the scale, you're singing every pitch in between each note. Autotune will un-smooth that - if the note you're singing is closest to a B, it will automatically change your pitch to that. Once you're closer to a Bb, it will change the pitch to that.

What this means is that you get an effect where the voice seems to be jumping from pitch to pitch, but it's really just the machine raising and lowering the pitch to the standard.

You can roll that off so that it's not quite so sensitive and only kicks in if something is way off. You can also adjust it so that it doesn't necessarily bump the pitch all the way up - sometimes you do want to leave it a little bit out of tune for the human touch. It's really an art, just like photoshopping is.

"Glee" is using it to its max - it's making sure that every note is perfectly processed and intact. On a cast album, you want to be a lot more sensitive. I worked on one cast album that is available in stores that I know for a fact includes a lot of autotuning that not even the singers know is on there. I won't say what it is, but having listened to it hundreds of times while mixing, there is only one note that sticks out to me and says "we fixed that", and only because we spent a couple hours trying to fix that one specific note. If you didn't know, you wouldn't notice. Like I said, I don't remember any of the other place but that one. And if you ask the singers on that recording, they will proudly tell you that there was no autotuning. I'm happy to let them live with their delusions.

In the end, it's a tool, just like reverb and EQ and all the other things that go into polishing up a recording. A good engineer is the one who makes it seem like nothing at all was done.

I should also add that none of this is because singers are "bad". These are top-of-the-line vocalists we're talking about. But in a performance, things go by quickly and you're caught up in the moment. On a recording, it's there with no distraction for all of eternity to be heard again and again and again. So, it gets fixed.

Hopefully that's a start. I'm happy to elaborate (or someone else on the board who knows sound can jump in to clarify.)

Short answer - like everything else in technology, it's a tool and can be used for either good or evil. It's not inherently one or the other.

[massofmen]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 4:36pm

isn't GLEE just a bunch of music videos inside a loose plot?

[broadwaybabywannabe]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 5:47pm

would someone please explain the logic about auto-tune and declining GLEE tv ratings....what the f**k does this have to do with a smaller tv audience in it's 3rd year?...anyone?...thanks!

( i personally think the show went too gay for a national audience...and i am one a very gay man who thinks that..just my opinion...)

[CyCoSpAz2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 6:55pm

"not so fast here...GLEE was ranked the 14th highest program in ratings with 18-49 year old viewers this past week:

14 - Glee FOX 3.7 - 4,710"

For the sake of comparison, this time last year it was
2 - Glee FOX 5.9 - 7,739

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:21pm

temms, thank you SO much! That actually makes sense to this non-musician/non-scientist. I must say I think the technique is over-used these days. We used to have famous musical theater stars (Gertrude Lawrence, Mary Martin) who only rarely sang on pitch, but sounded like real people singing. (And, yes, I get that you can adjust the auto-tune so that I don't notice it until I hear somebody sing without adjustment and go, "Ah, that's what singing live sounds like!")

Anyway, I really appreciate the information. If your answer was technical (and it wasn't overly so), the fault lay entirely with my questions.

***

broadwaybabywannabe, it was I--not temms--who shifted the conversation to the technicalities of auto-tune. We have a new thread bitching about GLEE every day and every bloody thread complains about auto-tune. So I thought it not unreasonable to ask what the hell everyone is complaining about.

But as for GLEE's ratings, no, I don't think auto-tune affects them. But it does give the entire show a slickness that detracts from the "Hey, kids, let's put on a show" vibe that originally made the show so appealing. (I'm not saying they use auto-tune more now, just that the entire show has gotten slicker and so now we're aware of the sound effects along with the other techniques.)

[SporkGoddess]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:23pm

For anyone else who's watching, what do you think of an Asian guy playing Riff? Does color-blind casting work for West Side Story, a show in which ethnicity is a pretty big issue?

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:30pm

Just in case you're seriously asking and not just mocking me for thread-jacking, I think high schools have special obligations when it comes to casting. Naturalism (which isn't big in musicals anyway) should take a back seat to making the most roles available to the widest bunch of students. I saw pictures of an interracial (black/white) OLIVER! once and though it was a shock at first, I then thought "Why the hell not?"

And as for Riff, I can tell you from personal experience that growing up in South Florida (before and after racial integration and during the influx from Cuba) that the very few Asian kids (actually one family who ran the Chinese restaurant in town) I knew were thought of as "white." In those days, forms that asked for racial identity gave choices of white, black and other. I asked Jane Moy which she checked and she told me "White. I'm not an 'other'."

So Asian Riff, no problem.

[donte7162004]

Posted: 10/4/11 at 8:32pm

The ratings are down because it's not good, period. I enjoyed the show a lot, but it became unwatchable for me the 2nd season. I remember the moment I said, "This is terrible....I'm not watching it anymore," which was when the cast members were at someone's house getting drunk. It was laughable and I changed the channel. I haven't watched since, and from the sound of things, I'm not missing much. It all reminds me of FAME back in the 80's. It was a great show the first season, and then got worse every year after that. Maybe shows like this should only be on for a few episodes. Tell your story...make your point...entertain us and move on.