What T-Pain Sounds Like Without Auto-Tune: Not That Much Better Than Sasha Frere-Jones

While Sasha Frere-Jones sings worse than a season-premiere American Idol reject, the New Yorker music reviewer's voice sounds almost passable after plugging it into Auto-Tune, the standard industry post-production tool. According to Frere-Jones's interview with producer Tom Beaujour, pretty much every recording artist on the radio uses Auto-Tune in the studio. Of course rapper T-Pain cranked up the tuner to create a robotic vocal effect often misdubbed the "Vocoder." But without it he's just another flat-singing rapper, as shown by the YouTube video below.