AutoTune

.aa - week five.

This week I had a play with...



Antares Auto-Tune is a plug-in used primarily to tune monophonic audio samples into particular scales. It is a particularly impressive tool (just ask the cast of Neighbours); it even caters for microtonal tunings. I tend to use it sparingly - I find the drawback of this plug-in its oversimplified interface which tends to give most music it touches a characteristically "Auto-Tune" sound.

It provides this neat feature of adding vibrato to the pitch, with a user defined attack time. In my opinion this only works effectively only on instrumental audio, however when used in vocal samples it adds the same colour that most plug-ins at to vocals - it inhumanises the sound (see: Panic! At the Disco). The sound of the human voice is something that a producer must treat very subtly with plug-ins, unless an inhuman effect is desired. If used subtly, Auto-Tuning system in isolation (without vibrato and the other features) works amazingly well on vocals. Further than that, the 'Graphic Mode' provides is a fairly clumsy interface for such an expensive plug-in. Nevertheless, writing in your own melodic lines really is not what you buy Auto-Tune for... instead click a few buttons and let it automatically tune out some minor errors.

nude.before.mp3 | nude.after.mp3

.sources.

Grice, David 01.04.08, “Outside the square (Part 2),” Lecture of EMU, Adelaide University.

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