So much music is actually created "in the box" today that I don't see a line anymore between music and effects. Whole pop tunes are done on laptops with maybe a MIDI keyboard. I'm bothered by out-of-tune vocals, so a major revolution for me has been the ability to tune and time singers. When Auto-tune arrived, I got comfortable with its graphical mode, but Melodyne is more intuitive, more powerful and more musical; it's all I use now for lead and harmony vocals. I still occasionally stick Auto-tune real-time on backup vocals that don't warrant individual hand-tuning. Today, every vocal that gets on a record has been tuned; it's just the standard. So now you notice how everybody was out of tune on the stuff we recorded in the prior millennium. I probably shouldn't say this, but today even singers who refuse to be tuned get tuned when they are not looking.
