"People felt like I was using it to sound good," he told NPR's All Things Considered. "But I was just using it to sound different"

It’s probably the most shocking musical about-face since Kiss took off their makeup.

T-Pain wasn’t the first musician to take an Auto-Tuned vocal track to the top of the charts, but the alien-sounding warble quickly became his trademark.

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But 10 or so years after his heyday, Mr. Pain wants to set the record straight. “People felt like I was using it to sound good,” he told NPR’s All Things Considered. “But I was just using it to sound different.”

So, T-Pain took to NPR’s “Tiny Desk” concert series – long a venue for acoustic-based acts – to flip the script. He performed a selection of his songs au naturel to commemorate both his 30th birthday and his upcoming greatest hits album.

His performance is pretty great, which suggests that all this time, T-Pain never needed Auto-Tune. Turns out, Auto-Tune needed him.

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