The Gregory Brothers use Macs and Auto-Tuning to make talking heads and politicians break into T-painfully infectious song.

Case Study: The Gregory Brothers

Occupation: Musicians

Gear: Mac Pro, Logic Pro 9 with Antares Auto-Tune and Celemony Melodyne plug-ins, Final Cut, Digidesign Digi 002 audio interface, USB MIDI keyboard, homemade green screen, iPhone.

The Gregory Brothers--Evan, Michael, Andrew, and Sarah--have an EP of original bluesy-country-soul music available on iTunes.

Joe Biden breaking into hyper-melody. The health care debate set to a funky-fresh beat. Congressmen warbling melodically about climate change. No, you’re not having a fever dream. You’re watching “Auto-Tune the News,” the YouTube sensation by Brooklyn-based musicians and lifelong Mac users the Gregory Brothers.

Auto-Tune is a pitch-correcting technology appearing with increasing frequency in hip-hop tracks by artists like T-Pain and Akon. It was created to fix the pitchiness of talent-deficient singers, but when set to super-high levels of correction, it makes a singer (or rapper or talker) sound vaguely robotic. The Gregorys take the “Auto-Tune the heck out of everything” gimmick to a new level by creating Auto-Tuned songs from the voices of politicians and wonks in news footage and even C-SPAN. And it’s all done with a Mac.
 
Footage comes first. “We check Drudge Report, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and popular blog aggregators to see what funny stuff happened in the news,” says Evan Gregory. Then they turn to certain “key all-stars,” like Katie Couric and Joe Biden, who have an uncanny (and totally accidental) talent for being funny when involuntarily Auto-Tuned.

The brothers recently stepped up to Logic Pro 9, from Logic Express 8.

Next up, the song. “We’ll write the music and make the beat, and then go through the so-called Auto-Tuning process to take the unintentional singers and create melodies out of their speech,” says Evan. This can be tricky, since they have to not only use Logic plug-ins, including Antares’ Auto-Tune and Celemony’s Melodyne, to adjust the pitch of the speakers’ voices to make it sound like they’re singing, but also play with the timing of the words so they match up with the beat.

Next, the Gregorys write parts for themselves, “to create a coherent verse,” Evan says. “Their lyrics plus our lyrics.”

Songs are produced in Logic Pro 9, with the help of a MIDI keyboard and Digidesign 002 audio interface connected to Michael Gregory’s Mac Pro. Once a track is finished, it’s time to get silly. The videos are filmed at Michael’s apartment, using a homemade green screen. “The green screen is literally a green sheet of fabric attached to the wall with thumbtacks,” says Evan.

“Green thumbtacks,” Michael interjects.

The Angry Gorilla performing in front of the homemade green screen.
 
“Writing lyrics, coming up with melodies, producing the instrumental tracks, that’s a blast,” Evan says. “But it’s also hilarious when we’re doing the actual taping, participating in a Congressional debate.” The parts are played and sung by Evan, Michael, their brother Andrew, and Evan’s wife, Sarah.

While the songs themselves are quite polished, especially considering how much is “sung” by news reporters and politicians, the videos are intentionally crude and campy. “Sometimes we’ll see a comment like, ‘He has a taped-on mustache! That’s so tacky!’ But from our end, that’s purposeful,” Michael says.

The iPhone made an appearance (to Auto-Tune Joe Biden) in episode #8.

Michael combines the green-screen footage with the original clips in Final Cut Pro, syncs it up to the song, and posts it to YouTube, where the videos receive hundreds of thousands of hits.

One fan is T-Pain himself, the star of the I Am T-Pain app for the iPhone, which lets users Auto-Tune their own voices. T-Pain’s label, Nappy Boy, and the app’s developers, Smule and Antares, contacted the Gregorys over the summer for help with beta-testing and promotion. T-Pain even appeared in “Auto-Tune the News #8.”

Rapper T-Pain appearing in "Auto-Tune the News #8."

“You can really tell Antares and Smule put hard work into it to get it right,” says Michael. “The beta version was already solid, but they spent a couple more months debugging it and making it better. It’s going to be one of the greatest time-wasters of our time.”

The quartet has even used the app onstage. “We performed a few of the videos by projecting them onto a screen, and we re-rendered the video so that all our own vocals were muted,” Evan explains. “We sang our parts live, and Michael actually ran an iPhone through the PA so he could use the I Am T-Pain app. Andrew, Sarah, and I were on a plain vocal mix, and Michael was Auto-Tuned on stage. It turned out pretty well.”

When they're not dressing up as Vikings, gorillas, or the ladies from The View for their videos, the Gregory Brothers clean up nice.

The brothers realize the key to enjoying all this Auto-Tuning is not to take it too seriously, and they’re thrilled that the iPhone lets any joker into the club. “The democratization of Auto-Tuned pop singing is a big development in our culture,” Evan deadpans. “It’s not just Michael and me and Kenny Chesney who can be Auto-Tuned. You can too.”