I'm writing an article about auto tune for a zine and am planning on referring to Against Me! using it on White Crosses... Although it sounds pretty obvious to me that it's there, can anybody here confirm that it's definitely on it? I think the clearest example is James' backing vocals on the Teenage Anarchist chorus... but it could be some other kind of effect, I guess?

I don't know if it's been officially noted anywhere but pretty sure if you tweeted James or Laura, they'd answer your question

Maybe it's not auto tune, maybe they're just getting better at singing?

I'm fairly confident that the lead vocals on the chorus (and the rest of the song) do not have any auto tune on it. There MIGHT be some used on the soprano backup part for the line "teenage anarchist" directly AFTER the chorus, but that's the only spot, and even then it could just sound unique because it's out of the vocal range we're used to or of doubling effects.

Unforunately, I'd have enough experience with the tool to generally recognize it. Also, I agree with the post about about tweeting the band. It's an interesting question. I wouldn't be surprised if Butch used it in interesting places we didn't notice to achieve different effects, instead of as a pitch correction tool.

White Crosses actually has pieces that seem auto-tuned.

The thing with auto tuners (or pitch shifting) now a days is that many of them are very, very good in the way of correcting out of tune vocals without you hearing it being used.

Even the standard softwares in the later verisions of Cubase etc (popular audio recording program for those who don´t know/cares about recording music themselves) is very good and transparent in the sound.

If Against Me! would use auto tuner and you can hear them using it I´m pretty sure they choosed to do it because they wanted to. And I think in the example of Teenage Anarchist they do that in the backup vocals on "teenage anarchist" in the 2nd verse.

Another way they could´ve done it is to over dub it (recording it twice and playing the tracks on top of each other, it can give that effect to the sound as well if the tracks are recorded very "tight" to each other.
(Sorry for crapy english)

James sounds like a fucking robot on White Crosses--his vocals were definitely auto-tuned. Tom's probably were too but I haven't listened to the album in a while so I'm not sure.

And that's a shame, too. If you listen to ATEC, James' and Tom's vocals sound so perfect without any (obvious) tweaking.