Kavita Seth slams musicians who use auto-tune:They consider music a hobby

Singer Kavita Seth slams the trend of using auto-tune by musicians, saying professional singers don’t use such tools

Singer Kavita Seth, who live recorded all the songs of her latest album, Dayaar-e-Rooh without any arrangement, insists that’s the correct way to record music, instead of using auto-tune to get the rhythm right.

Kavita Seth recently released her album, Dayaar-e-Rooh

“Music is an energy, and therefore, I wanted to showcase it in a continuous flow,” says Seth, adding, “That’s why, the main thought behind my latest album was to record all the nine selected tracks live without any auto-tune or designing or planning whether I’ll be singing a particular line once, twice, or thrice. It was all natural.”

In the era of auto-tune, recording songs live without any arrangement is not preferred much. And that's where the Rangi Saari singer slams the increasing dependency on the option to auto-tune songs. “I think singers who opt for auto-tune, they consider music a hobby. They don’t know how to sing, but want to listen to their voices with a particular rhythm. I don’t feel professional singers should need this in any way because there’s simply no requirement. All this equipment is good for some time or when there is a slight problem, but you can’t depend on it completely. It tends to destroy the song. One should focus more on practising and becoming better instead of autotuning.”

Looking back at her journey and citing than as an example, the 52-year-old elaborates, “I’ve been singing live in my concerts for almost as far as I remember. I always wanted to keep the human error part of singing alive whether it’s from a slight cough or missing a tabla beat because that has a beauty attached to it. If an artiste delivers everything that’s perfect, it looks somewhat artificial and that’s one thing I never wanted for myself.”

Up next, Seth is working on a “lot of music” ranging from devotional, ghazals to sufi and Bollywood tunes. Asked if she feels Bollywood music gets more importance as compared to singles and independent albums, and Seth says, “I’m doing a lot of work for both Bollywood and the independent music space, and I don’t think Bollywood in any way is overshadowing anything. There was an era when Bollywood music was at its peak, but nowadays, independent music artistes are doing well because often, they churn out a song, which becomes immensely popular and gets selected for a Bollywood film.”

In fact, the singer asserts that Bollywood has a much bigger role to play these days when it comes to giving musicians the right reach. “As an independent artiste, you may have a limited reach, and Bollywood films help in increasing your audience base, and make your music reach the masses. Therefore, both mediums are very important, and both are working parallelly,” she concludes.