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Watch: T-Pain Feels “Unappreciated” For Auto-Tune Influence After Working On “808s & Heartbreak”

Posted on January 8th, 2014
by
Staff Editor


When T-Pain hit the scene with Rappa Ternt Sanga in 2005, he was the only artist to use his trademark auto-tune technique at that level. 9 years later, it’s become a staple in hip hop hits from the likes of artists that vary from Future to Kanye West.

In an interview with Vlad TV, T-Pain cleared up statements he made previously where he stated that “I don’t think Future gets the technology very well, I don’t think he understands how it actually works.”

Check out how T-Pain clarified this statement and talked about how he felt about Kanye West gaining so much acclaim for using auto-tune below the jump…

“I can firmly say that nobody has looked into Auto-Tune the way I have,” T-Pain said in response. “You know what I’m saying? I’ve looked into Auto-Tune. I literally met the inventor of Auto-Tune. I talked to him about the way that Auto-Tune was invented. Auto-Tune was invented by this guy who used to be an oil digger. This guy used to work on an oil rig and they used to send sonar signals and tones down on the ground and if it came back a different tone up to where your equipment was then that means that determines if you got oil or not…He used that same math to make Auto-Tune. And it’s like you send the tone into Pro Tools and it sends you the right tone back. And a lot of math went into that shit…I really studied this shit and I know for a fact that nobody has sat down in the studio and studied this shit that much.”

T-Pain has worked with Kanye West on more than one occasion, one of which being Kanye’s auto-tune heavy album 808s & Heartbreaks. In the interview, T-Pain expresses his frustrations with being an innovator of the use of auto-tune in hip hop only for Kanye West to do the same thing and achieve the level of success that he did.

“The crazy thing was I worked on 808s & Heartbreak with Kanye,” T-Pain said. “I went down to Hawaii for like 10 days with that nigga. You know what I’m saying? And Kanye actually told me himself. My album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, he said ‘I listened to your album Rappa Ternt Sanga. I heard all the songs. I fuckin love your album Rappa Ternt Sanga. I think you a genius. Blah blah blah.’ He went through this whole spiel. He said, ‘But what I figured out that Rappa Ternt Sanga is just a bunch of love songs with a shit load of base in em.’ And I’m like ‘Well, love songs is like heartbreaks and the shit load of bass is the 808s. So, you calling your album 808s & Heartbreak because you making a bunch of love songs with a shit load of bass in ‘em?’ And he basically was like ‘Yeah, pretty much.’”

“I respect that shit, but it’s like the praise that he got from it was like ‘Oh my God, this is so creative. This is the new shit. This is the shit,’” he said. “And I’m like ‘Well, what happened in 2005 when I dropped Rappa Ternt Sanga and it was the same album. That’s kind of weird.’ You know what I’m saying. It just felt like I was unappreciated and anything like that. Any originator of anything is gonna be the lesser known because it’s the newest thing and that’s just not—it’s not right, but that’s just how shit goes.”

[via HipHopDX]

Keith Reid-Cleveland

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