T-Pain Swears Off Auto-Tune, But Don't Think That Means He's Going Unplugged

He should really open a haberdashery next.

​Earlier this hour a tweet from Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff crossed the SOTC transom, and it contained important news for fans of music-production technology and pop-tinged R&B: "End of an era: @TPAIN says 'I vow right here, right now, to never use Auto-Tune again,'" it read. Mon dieu! Could this mean that Teddy Pin-Her-Ass-Down would drop the effects and get nice and close to the microphone on his next record? Or could it just mean that he'd figured out that, hey, since so much of his brand is tangled up in the idea of his vocals being electronically altered, he might as well come out with a vocal processor branded with his own name?

Behold.

As the exclusive provider of The T-Pain Effect™, iZotope is working directly with T-Pain to evolve his sound through our award-winning technology. Together, iZotope and T-Pain will bring new vocal processing possibilities to mainstream and professional products worldwide.

Aha! So he's just moving out of Auto-Tune's shadow and into his own spotlight with the help of iZotope, an unfortunately named (seriously can we stop with the Apple swagger-jacking) outfit that specializes in creating various pieces of technology (hardware, software, and the like) for music studios. Honestly, this is a move that makes sense; the iPhone app mimicking his vocal-processing style is still doing better than most (it's currently among the App Store's top five paid music apps), so why not expand his successful branding to the pro world? Especially since, with economic conditions in the world being what they are, even a cubic-zirconium version of his Big Ass Chain would be too much of a risk to put into mass production.