Auto DE-Tune

[swarfrat]

Yeah, you heard me. I was messing with vocals on a project. My pitch isnt bad, but when i lay down vocals first,it can be tough to stay on pitch the entire song. I should mention that I'm doing this in software, running Linux, so this probably doesnt apply to anyone else. I even had to hack the plugin to allow negative correction in the first place. But i did, then tried monitoring with anticorrection. (Not printing the effect, just monitoring with it)

All i can say is WOW. It works. And no black eyed peas effect either. I was shocked how fast and how close my voice tracked pitch. I even played back a conventionally recorded track from last night to make sure it was working. (Yuck. It was. Made it far worse, as expected).  Its works by jacking up your ears pitch correction feedback loop. It works a ton better than trying to harmonize with a pitch corrected version of yourself. Dont know if anything off the shelf allows this, but this is big. You will. And you're not printing the effect so... Nobody hears that autotune crap.

 

[Cagey]

I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're saying. Are you monitoring at a different pitch so your natural voice pitch fits better?

Also, you've done a lot of work correcting previous posts whose pictures were lost to Photobucket's recent policy change, which I'm sure everybody appreciates, but you may not have noticed that you neglected your sig graphic. Just a heads-up.

 

[Sovereign_13]

Based on what I know about pitch-correction, I think swarfrat is saying they pitch correct the vocals to the key of the song while recording, but rather than fighting the pitch corrected voice for proper intonation in the monitors, they un-pitch-correct it in the monitors.  So they can sing with themselves instead of synth-swarfrat.

The Black-Eyed Peas/T-Pain "robot voice" sound is actually not what "autotune" sounds like unless you set it up to sound like someone playing a keyboard over your voice.  Most of the decent modules are pretty natural sounding.  I imagine early modules sounded like that due to inherent software/hardware limitations, but with all the processing power and DSP we have these days, the only reason it sounds like now is either engineer intent or lack of experience.

 

[Cagey]

Soo... the recorded voice is corrected, but the monitored voice is not? I guess that would make sense. If you heard the corrected voice while you were singing, it might be tough to keep on pitch, because you'd always be chasing it? I've never played around with one of those things.

 

[Sovereign_13]

That's my guess.  Or swarfrat is running it through a de-correcting module when recording harmonies?  Seems like it'd be easier to just record two identical tracks (from the same input), with a pitch correction module on one track and none on the other.  Route the raw track to the monitors, or disable playback on the corrected one...

It's kind of hard to judge what's going on in a recording setup from an internet forum.  But I think the principle is there.

 

[swarfrat]

I'm only recording raw vocal. I'm monitoring my vocal which is intentionally pitch shifted worse than what I'm singing. If you're 20 cents sharp, you hear 40 cents sharp. It's almost magic, effortless, fast, rock solid. Pitch CORRECTION is done in your head.  No hunting either.

A few years ago there was a time analyzer device called the "Russian Dragon" and the joke was that the best use of it was to hook it up to electrodes to zap you when you were ahead or behind. It's sort of the same principle.

I actually haven't done anything to my photobucket account, not sure why any particular pictures got better or worse. I'll fix the sig though.

 

[Sovereign_13]

Ahhhhh, I think I see.  You're pitch-correcting out-of-tune notes to be more out of tune in the monitors, which forces you to correct yourself rather than having the software correct you.

That's interesting.  I might see if our singer would be up for trying that next time.

 

[mayfly]

That is very interesting.  Should try that...

 

[swarfrat]

I'm not sure if anything currently out there allows it. Before you read this, you probably thought "Why would you want to?" (unless you had the same idea).  It also means you need some sort of ear for pitch. I doubt it would've helped my dad's singing. 

I was recording a project of stuff I've sung to my son since he was a baby. I was getting bogged down trying to create guide tracks for stuff - with this - I can lay down a usable vocal track ( even I replace it later - it won't wreck the following tracks) a capella with just a click.  THAT's the game changer for me. Set the click, sing, go on to the next step or song.  If I have too much instrumentation during the guide track stage, it can be tough to get the correct swing on the vocals sometimes.

 

[Sovereign_13]

To be honest, my first thought was auto-detuning in the sense of creating a chorus effect (some guitar pitch-shifting pedals will do this) or some sort of automatic/robotic guitar tuning that let you use non-standard pitches.

I would expect you're right that there probably isn't any third-party, closed-source software that explicitly does that.  I'd be curious to see if it's something that can be done by "abusing" the settings in some module, though I'd be less than optimistic.