What Does I Sound Like With Auto Tune
With the return of The X Factor to TV screens, we look at the physics behind pitch correction.
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When did auto-tune become a standard in modern hiphop, and why? Been playing a lot of GTA V and listening to the hip hop stations, and 90% of the tracks have auto-tuned vocals, even if. Dec 09, 2015 But to tell that someone's voice is being auto tuned you can tell because the auto tuner creates a flat sound when a particular word is song meaning there is no variation in certain pitches it's just becomes monotonic. A voice can hit several pitches in. Best Auto-Tune Software for Vocal Pitch Correction. A creative process and usually makes us sound great! What’s not to like? Auto-Tune is a software plug-in and hardware audio processor made by Antares but it has become synonymous with the correcting of vocals since the 1998 Cher track “Believe,” where it was used to excess.
Back on the TV schedule for the autumn, the singing competition programme The X Factor was criticised last year after it emerged that the contestants’ voices were being altered via Auto-Tune.
Producer Simon Cowell subsequently banned any further use of the technology on the show.
What Does I Sound Like With Auto Tuner
Drum kit vst plugin free download. But how does audio signal processing help to make singers’ voices sound better?
What would you do if I sang out of tune?
Few singers are perfect. Sometimes, the pitch of their vocal slightly misses the exact note they’re trying to hit.
If they are a little out of tune, the vocal track can still be rescued – or ruined, depending on your point of view – with a little help from the science of signal processing.
The pitch of a note is dependent on the frequency of the sound wave produced – the A above middle C is usually defined as 440 Hz. Therefore manipulating the frequency can produce a different note, or hit an exact note from a noise that is slightly off-key.
Musical scales are divided into 12 pitches each separated by a semitone – the difference in note between two adjacent keys on a piano or frets on a guitar neck. The goal of pitch correction is to retune a slightly high or low note to the nearest semitone.
In the system usually used by MIDI instruments in which pitch is assigned a number, with the 440-Hz A being 69 and each semitone increasing or decreasing the pitch number by 1, it is related to frequency f by a simple formula.
If an attempt at singing that A note actually came out at, say, 445 Hz instead, then using a computer to correct the frequency back down would ensure that the recording sounds in tune.
Sound engineers can’t simply change the frequency by itself, however.
Because the frequency of a wave is related to its speed via its wavelength, the duration of the sound would change too – this is why sped-up tapes sound chipmunk-like.
The frequency can be altered without changing the speed by going digital.
Music by numbers
What Autotune Does Drake Use
Although it is possible to alter analogue signals – those based directly on the electrical signal generated by a microphone, or by a guitar pickup – a wider range of effects is possible when working with digital signals.
A digital signal uses discrete values rather than continuous ones, so converting an analogue signal requires taking sets of discrete points or samples. (Higher sampling rates more closely approximate the original sound).
These digital signals can be altered so that a sound produces the correct musical note by using a phase vocoder.
This works by first changing the duration of the sound without altering its frequency, and then changing the frequency to both hit the correct pitch and restore the original duration.
The name comes from its use of the signal’s phase information to manipulate the signal in the desired way.
It breaks an audio signal down into many small, overlapping frames and then changes the spacing of those frames to change the total duration of the sound. In practice, this is a complicated task that requires the use of the advanced maths of Fourier transforms to convert the signal into a form that can be manipulated in this way.
The sound is then resampled to take it back to its original duration and hit the desired note.
As guitarpitchshifter.com explains, if the aim was to double the frequency then this would be as easy as picking one out of every two samples and constructing a waveform from those. But to fit the signal back into its original length when not scaling by an integer, interpolation is used to determine which bits of the sample should go at which points.
For imperfect singers to remain perfectly in key, we have this piece of maths and physics to thank – or to blame.
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I've recently started using the Antares Auto-Tune plug-in (version 3), and I need help! I used it recently on a male vocal that needed tuning. Even when using the plug-in's Automatic mode, I can't get a good sound out of it — the corrected voice sounds 'warbly' and fake. Can you offer any advice?
SOS Forum Post
What Would I Sound Like With Autotune
Editor In Chief Paul White replies: Auto-Tune is designed to address the problem of vocal pitching imperfections, though I've also used it successfully on other instruments, including electric guitar solos and fretless basses. It is important to note that it can only handle monophonic sources, so if it sees complex mixed material, or sounds that have been treated with delay or reverb, it will tend to pass those sounds through untreated. This means if you have a vocal track with a lot of spill from other sources, Auto-Tune may refuse to work properly. On the plus side, it means you can treat a messy guitar solo that includes double notes or partial chords and they will all be ignored, leaving Auto-Tune to do its job only on single sustained notes.
The plug-in works by detecting the pitch of the incoming material in real time. Auto-Tune then uses a pitch-shifting algorithm to adjust the pitch of the input to the nearest note in a preset or user-definable scale. You can also leave Auto-Tune set to a chromatic scale, but I've found that this rarely works perfectly, especially if the singer uses a lot of bends or vibrato, as you can end up creating trills between two adjacent semitones. This could be contributing to the 'warbly' effect you're encountering, so make sure you have set the plug-in to work off the appropriate key and scale type for the melody you're treating.
What Does I Sound Like With Auto Tuners
The secret to making Auto-Tune sound natural is in not trying to make it correct sounds too quickly. There's a control called Retune — it appears as a rotary knob in version 3's GUI and as a slider in earlier versions — which adjusts the rate at which pitch correction takes place. You could think of it as the equivalent of a compressor's Attack control, and it's helpfully labelled with 'fast' and 'slow' at either extreme, although a numerical value is also shown. If you've already experimented with setting this control as fast as it will go, you'll have heard the familiar pitch-quantising effect that's been done to death on countless records since Cher's single 'Believe'. Setting a longer correction rate — move the knob/slider to its halfway point or below — allows a singer's natural bends, scoops and vibrato to pass through without obvious modification. Whenever they sustain a note, however, it will be pulled smoothly into pitch.
The Tracking control determines how Auto-Tune responds to low levels of spill. Again, it's intuitively labelled with 'relaxed' at one extreme and 'choosy' at the other. In most cases where the input signal is fairly clean, the default setting of around three-quarters of the way up should be fine.
By using Auto-Tune on a clean, untreated vocal take, and adjusting the Retune control carefully, starting from the 'slow' end of the scale, you should be able to achieve transparent pitch correction.
The plug-in's Graphic mode allows far more detailed correction of the individual notes of a take, and is certainly not for beginners. I'd suggest that you get the hang of using Auto-Tune in Automatic mode before you get stuck into its more advanced features. If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading the Vocal Fixes article in SOS October 2003, which gives a fascinating insight into the ingenious ways that Auto-Tune is being used at the cutting edge of commercial record prodution.
I've yet to find a natural-sounding use for the vibrato section of Auto-Tune, as it sounds too mechanical and synth-like for my taste, but it may be useful as a special effect.
Finally, Auto-Tune and its contemporaries only sound really good when the singer you are working on has reasonable pitching in the first place. It is designed to correct errors of pitching, not entirely wrong notes, so there will be some vocalists, me included, for whom there is no salvation!