May I add myself on this one.
I'm gonna make it very extensive and detailed so that you all can understand this perfectly:
Even though I haven't studied anywhere particularly, I think I can help here. I'm an artist myself (a musician), I don't do POP music like Michael did. I'm a Dancehall Reggae (with some RnB too) artist. I spend most of my time at recording studios, either recording my songs or mixing/mastering my tracks with producers and engineers.
I've read a lot of misleading information on the boards (not only here, actually I've been on a lot of MJ dedicated forums lately, but particularly on MJHideout). A lot of people seem to think Auto-Tune is a "person-exchanger" (does that even exist?) effect. There are two ways of using Auto-Tune, and neither can make you sound like a whole different person. The way you can use Auto-tune for (the plugin was actually concived to be use this way) is to correct vocals singing out of tune (hence, out-of-tune auto-tune), minor flaws and defects of vocal takes which would have been amazing otherwise (I mean, if there hadn't been any performance issues at the moment of recording). You may be wondering: How can a vocal recording be amazing if there are certain parts out of key? Well, the energy might be perfect, the dictation and pronnunciation might be spot on, even the intention the artist put when he/she sung it can be great. And sometimes you can't reproduce that SAME EXACT take twice, so there's nothing left to do but to use techonlogy to get it right, and honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with it. BELIEVE ME, most of your favourite artists (of ANY genre) and most of your favourite songs (of ANY genre) wouldnt exist if it wasnt for technology and auto-tune used the right way.
The other way of using Auto-Tune is actually... abusing of it. When you take the Plugin's setting to an extreme, giving a certain Scale, it'll robotize the sound, and make it all jumpy, like you can appreciate in most RnB/Hip-Hop songs lately. The so called T-Pain effect.
As "Daniel.San" said on his post, there's NO plugin, no editing possible, to change the Vocal Registry, and/or the Pronnunciation of a human being. You CAN make a voice sounds bassier, or alter the pitch to go higher or lower, you can do a lot of things, but what you can't do is make it sound like a different human being.
That's why certain impersonators (Youtube for Marcus Joseph) sing ALMOST, JUST LIKE, Michael Jackson when they perform one of Michael's songs, but they CAN NOT achieve the same amount of perfection and similarity when they have to sing something of their own production or from some other artist besides MJ.
Please, don't automatically assign any strange side effects to technology or to editing technics, or plugins. Up until now, there are still limits as to where a human being can go with technology, and what they can do with it. Up until now, we cannot sound exactly like somebody else. So, if you hear someone that 'sounds like.......' but you still hear differences, even if they're tini tiny differences, then TRUST your ears, they won't lie to you, but Sony will.
