T Pain Singer

TO make his music sound fresh, rapper T-Pain dusted off a decades-old device -- the vocoder. No matter that the voice alteration machine, used by the likes of Pink Floyd, Roger Troutman and the Electric Light Orchestra, had largely fallen out of favor. "I figured if I didn't use it, even though I can sing without it, I would have just sounded like another singer," T-Pain says. "I had to do something to distinguish myself from everybody else." That he did.

TO make his music sound fresh, rapper T-Pain dusted off a decades-old device -- the vocoder. No matter that the voice alteration machine, used by the likes of Pink Floyd, Roger Troutman and the Electric Light Orchestra, had largely fallen out of favor. "I figured if I didn't use it, even though I can sing without it, I would have just sounded like another singer," T-Pain says. "I had to do something to distinguish myself from everybody else." That he did.