A new DNA

You've heard pitch correction if you've listened to music on the radio in the past decade or so.  There's no other way around it.  The technology to "correct" pitches has been around for a bit, and it's somewhat insidious.  You may notice it overtly in some songs as an effect, but more often than not it's used to create a "perfect" track, usually for pop singers who needed to get on to their fashion shoot. 

The wonders of technology makes it available for individual notes in chords now, too.  Direct note access gives this software the ability to pick out notes in a cluster and individually "correct" them.  Now intrepid engineers can go after every last imperfection and get it exactly "right."  From a purely technological standpoint, that's incredible.  The geek in me is thrilled.

The bassist in me wonders why they don't just play it right in another take.  It also looks strangely at the concept of chords, but that's another story.

Forgive the overuse of quotes above, but it's meant to illustrate the subjective nature of this tool.  A lot more goes into a good take than just getting the notes perfect.  This tool would have saved me a lot of time on past recordings (well, not ME per se - see the above mention of chords), but at it's heart it's just another tool.  It has its spots for appropriate use, and there are times where it's probably better left in the box in favor of another take.