JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Microphone and Vocalist Forum Using Antares Autotune 4

I abused autotune on my first CD, unfortunately. When I listen to a couple of those tracks now, I just cringe. I am half joking when I say that the current style of flat pop rock singing, ie with no vibrato, was in part to make it easier for autotune to work.

I notice and appreciate when artists don't use it, actually. The latest Crowded House CD has some vocals on it that are a teeny bit pitchy, but I like the fact that they left Neil's voice alone and didn't mess with it.

Autotune is dangerous if you're not really good at using it. It definitely leaves artifacts you can hear.

I've got Melodyne Uno, which I personally like much better than autotune - it's easier to use. Both tools can easily be abused.

I like to track vocals the same way each time - first, I'll sing the song "safely," really concentrating on pitch, phrasing, etc. For the second take, since I know I've got the "safe" track done, I'll sing it with more emotion, take more chances, etc. And then for the third track I'll sing somewhere in between. What usually ends up happening is that track two becomes the vocal track, but if there are any glaring problems with it I'll paste in part of track one or track three. And I make a comp track.

Sometimes the entire thing isn't working and I'll throw away all three tracks and try it another day.

So if I really like the comp track, that's what I'll go with, and if there are a few notes in it that strike my ear wrong, I'll pull the track up in melodyne and have a look. If I can fix it and I can't hear any artifacts, ie it sounds natural, I'll fix it. If I have to fix more than a couple of notes in the thing, I'll probably just resing it a different day. If the problems are small, I'll leave them in.

In terms of humanizing tracks, yeah, it has been done and will continue to be done. Just like drum programmers will put a cymbal hit very slightly behind a bass drum hit, just like it happens in real life. Or move a snare up a few milliseconds. Anything to inject some life into the machine. The human voice is pretty flawed already, though. Yeah - some day some producer will say, "I've got a great idea... why don't we try turning OFF the pitch correction?"