Mark Ronson says Kanye West changed his mind about Auto-tune

As he was interviewing artists and inventors for a six-part docuseries on the intersection of technology and music, Mark Ronson noticed a recurring theme of visionary artists taking technological advances and misusing them to suit their own creative curiosity.

"I think at one point we were even throwing around the series title 'Accidents Will Happen' after the Elvis Costello song," Ronson recalls.

"We're like, 'Wow, that is just the thing that keeps coming up: These happy accidents by geniuses like Prince or Paul McCartney.'"

They ended up calling the series "Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson."

But those accidents still happen.

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How Prince started 'playing around' with his drum machine

Auto-Tune, for instance, was designed to cover up for human imperfection, nudging wrong notes in the right direction — or as Ronson calls it, "cheating."

Now, of course, it's just as likely to be used to make the human voice sound more robotic or do things no human voice could do without a little digital assistance.

Ronson points to the Linn drum machine, designed to sound so much like a real drummer, you could use one in your studio instead of hiring a session player.

"Then Prince starts playing around with the back of the box and tunes the drum machine down," Ronson says. "And you get the sound of 'Purple Rain' and 'Let's Go Crazy.'"

True geniuses like Stevie Wonder can sway the purists

Another theme that runs through "Watch the Sound" is the initial wave of negative reactions most of these advances faced.

"A lot of these things were really feared and resented when they first came out," Ronson says, recalling how musicians unions protested the rise of synthesizers, claiming they were taking jobs away from string players and flautists.

"Then you get Stevie Wonder doing something genius, making 'Talking Book,'" he says. "And you're like, 'No, actually, the machines are as soulful as the people using them. You put someone incredibly soulful on a machine and it's gonna have soul."

In addition to the argument that new technologies are putting real musicians out of work, there's a natural human rejection of change at work.

"It's not real music," Ronson says, in the voice of an anti-progress purist.

"'This isn't how we do things.' Then a couple people do something really special and genius with it and it somehow weirdly goes from being completely outside to becoming the sound of the mainstream."

How Kanye West changed Ronson's mind about Auto-Tune

Ronson himself was skeptical at best when Auto-Tune became a thing.

"I think to my slightly more analog-purist sensibilities and what I was doing at the time, I was like, 'Well, I'm not sure if I like this,'" he recalls.

"I was probably a bit of a hater about it while probably secretly using it to tune the occasional vocal."

It even took a while for him warm up to the melancholy robot vibe that Kanye West was able to achieve through Auto-Tune on "808s & Heartbreak."

"Kanye never pretended to be a singer, but he obviously has incredible melodies in his head, and this was the thing that enabled him to sound like that," he says.

"I remember when I heard 'Love Lockdown,' I was like, 'This isn't Kanye. This isn't the hip-hop beats and the boom-bap and the samples that I love.' It took me, like, a year or two to really come around to it."

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The fact that he hasn't completely abandoned the analog-purist aesthetic that defined his early work as a producer while remaining open to the latest technological advances makes Ronson an intriguing voice to take the viewer through these episodes.

A casual reading of his resume reveals a restless spirit willing to explore a wide variety of sounds and genres.

In the course of winning seven Grammys, he's worked with an astonishing array of talent — Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Nas, Duran Duran, Adele, Bruno Mars, Paul McCartney, Sean Ono Lennon and Queens of the Stone Age, to name a few.

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At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, he won Best Dance Recording for his work with Diplo as Silk City and Best Song Written for Visual Media as the co-writer of Lady Gaga's "Shallow," which also won an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

"I'm always gonna be moved by like an incredible guitar player like Tommy Brenneck from the Dap-Kings," Ronson says.

"But I sit in the studio with people like Kevin Parker and Diplo and I see them doing things and tweaking this drum sound so the kick drum sounds immense. And I'm like, 'Yeah, but I want to be able to do that too.'"

Having come up through club culture as a DJ, Ronson still wants beats that knock.

"So until it becomes kind of, I guess, unseemly or age-inappropriate, I'm gonna still try to keep up on those technologies and do those things because they're exciting to me."

How a TED Talk inspired this docuseries

The six-part series grew out of a TED Talk he had on sampling.

"It was about the technology and how people sample but also Slick Rick and the song 'La Di Da Di' that's one of the most sampled songs ever, and how it's the bridge between Biggie and Miley Cyrus and all this stuff in between," he says.

Like many TED Talks, the idea was to talk about a topic he was passionate about while also bringing in that portion of the audience who may not share his passion.

And as fate would have it, an Apple TV+ executive caught that TED Talk.

"So he came to me and said, 'I want to do a show about music that's educational, a bit techy and geeky, but also really fun and interesting for everyone,'" Ronson recalls.

The executive put him in touch with Morgan Neville, the documentary filmmaker whose "20 Feet from Stardom" Ronson loved.

Breaking it down into six episodes

"We just started to brainstorm and talk about music," Ronson says.

"And we were like, 'OK, if we're gonna make six episodes, what do we narrow it down to and how do we talk to these people we love about the stuff we love and break it down in a way that makes sense?'"

They arrived at a format of breaking it down so that each episode is focused on one major technological advance — Auto-Tune, reverb, sampling, synthesizers, drum machines and distortion.

"I thought there was no way we're gonna be able to cover everything exhaustively," Ronson recalls.

"And Morgan put it in a way that made me feel a little better. He's like, 'Listen, this isn't the anthology. We're doing this through your lens. So this is gonna be better if it's about the things that have been important to you, or the things that you can really talk to other people passionately about.''

At the same time, Ronson feels they managed to arrive at a cross-section of technologies that "do really cover a lot of the wheelhouse" in pop music.

"And the great thing is when you're talking about sampling, it's not just about hip-hop," Ronson says.

"It's talking to Paul McCartney about the tape loops and 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' And the Mellotron keyboard and going back to French music concrete, which I knew nothing about when we started."

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'I'm just always learning and absorbing like a sponge'

McCartney is but one of several voices who turn up in multiple episodes.

"I was like, 'OK, well, if we're gonna talk to somebody like Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, who people love, we definitely want him to talk about reverb and Auto-Tune and synthesizers and drum machines," Ronson says.

"Because that's in all of his music in a very cool way that's very unique to him."

Other voices in the mix include the two surviving Beastie Boys, Sean Ono Lennon, Hank Shocklee, Questlove, Angel Olsen, DJ Premier, Jonsi, Nick Rhodes, Andy Taylor, Gary Numan, Ezra Koenig, T-Pain and Dave Grohl.

"When you're just sitting next to somebody who's made something I think is great or has a superpower when it comes to music — it could be a legend like Dave Grohl or a newbie like King Princess — I'm just always learning and absorbing like a sponge," Ronson says.

"Sometimes that means I'm in the studio, making music with them. Other times like this here, it's just listening."

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Mark Ronson says Kanye West changed his mind about Auto-tune