Is this audition autotuned?

A

Alagner

New member
Hey everyone, I hope this is an appropriate forum for what I'm posting, as I need some expertise regarding vocal processing.

I got sent an audition piece recently, and I suspect it's been heavily auto-tuned to get it to sound good. Some parts of it sound artificial to me, and I'd like to know whether it was pitch-corrected or not before we waste time bringing this person in for an audition.

Since it was recorded over our original demo, I was able to subtract that and get a mostly-isolated vocal. I'm hoping that some of you, who have had experience of using Melodyne and/or Autotune to fix these things, will recognise some of the standard artifacts and tell-tale signs and point them out. Or, you'll note their absence and tell me I'm wrong.

Example 1 (707kb mp3)
Example 2 (378kb mp3)
 
Thanks for listening! I see what you're saying, but in my past editing experience I would still get this with Melodyne when the note was wobbling around - it adjusts the average pitch center but it can still be off for much of the duration, unless you crank it up to obvious T-Pain levels.
 
100% defo effected ... with what i'm not sure .. some floorboard effect? like a digitech vocalist?



edit:- thinking about it it could be innocent .. ask him for a raw take,he might not be that bad
 
It's hard to tell. One of the things that has started happening since autotune got popular is that singers have now started singing like auto-tuned vocals sound.

If it was tuned, it was tuned poorly.
 
Btyre2013 said:
it's without doubt tuned in, sounds like melodyne to me from that weird vibrato with compression artifacts.
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"Sounds" like Melodyne? Melodyne used on a fairly decent singer doesn't have a 'sound'. And if the user of Melodyne really intended to make the performance better, I would hope they would actually place the notes to pitch.

So I agree with Farview in that if it were tuned, it was not done well.
 
I ran it through Melodyne myself just to see the pitch display, and most of the notes are on pitch on average, even if they wobble about a bit. When I've Melodyned vocals in the past it would never slam everything 100% to pitch (and I probably wouldn't want that anyway). And leaving a few notes a bit off-pitch is the sort of thing I might expect if a singer wasn't sure about their pitch and only opted to fix the bits that they believed were bad.

What especially makes me think it's been treated is that the vibrato on the long notes sounds very artificial, far too regular for someone that is not pitch-perfect, not to mention it being suspiciously close to the 5.5x per second rate that Autotune's "Create Vibrato" feature offers as a default. Also, that flourish near the end of the first recording also sounds very unnatural to me, like the passing notes really had to be pulled into position.
 
If they're going to try and sneak a corrected version through the initial audition process and think that I can't spot it, why would they tell the truth when I ask?

For now, I just want to know if my hunch is right.
 
Alagner said:
If they're going to try and sneak a corrected version through the initial audition process and think that I can't spot it, why would they tell the truth when I ask?

For now, I just want to know if my hunch is right.
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your intuition is spot on, it's been messed around with, the vibrato is not natural and has been altered with either melodye or autotune, that's the truth.
 
There's a ton of artifacts, but I would be inclined to attribute those to process you used to isolate the vocals first.

Can you post the raw before you tampered with it, Alagner?
 
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the original demo - but the isolation process was simply a phase-inverted copy of the original instrumental. The only artifacts I would have introduced are from slight differences as a result of the vocal demo being re-encoded to MP3 again, which allow parts of the signal to leak through (which can be heard during the silences).
 
Alagner said:
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the original demo - but the isolation process was simply a phase-inverted copy of the original instrumental. The only artifacts I would have introduced are from slight differences as a result of the vocal demo being re-encoded to MP3 again, which allow parts of the signal to leak through (which can be heard during the silences).
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That, plus any differences introduced by dynamic compression. (i.e. If he compressed the track he sent back to you, the backing track would have been flavored by that, affecting the inversion process)
 
Alagner said:
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the original demo -
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can you post an unedited (by you) clip? "so empty,its my kingdom" ?



the clips you posted are 100% tampered with,i doubt very much you could "effect" a vocal like that by simply flipping phase .. (its not impossible leave the "fattening" fx in the middle) only one way to be sure :)
 
No, I can't post any of the original audition unfortunately, but the uncanny vibrato and the odd pitch shifts are all there on it.
 
This made me look back to my principal examiner days for Music Technology here in the UK. The Examiners would send me submissions they were absolutely positive were cheating. Maybe they were, in fact I often agreed, but there was no evidence that held up - but best of all, like this one, they were still flawed, so they got less than good marks. My attitude was always that if people cheated and ended up with a still flawed product - they were just trying to make rubbish sound good, and listening like this one, made the quality easy to assess.

That's not a good product - real or tampered. Not worth worrying about. It sounds weird, and that's what the judges will hear.
 
rob aylestone said:
This made me look back to my principal examiner days for Music Technology here in the UK. The Examiners would send me submissions they were absolutely positive were cheating. Maybe they were, in fact I often agreed, but there was no evidence that held up - but best of all, like this one, they were still flawed, so they got less than good marks. My attitude was always that if people cheated and ended up with a still flawed product - they were just trying to make rubbish sound good, and listening like this one, made the quality easy to assess.

That's not a good product - real or tampered. Not worth worrying about. It sounds weird, and that's what the judges will hear.
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Agreed. Whether the performance was modified or not; it still didn't sound very good to me. Just my opinion tho.

Enjoy the personal audition! :)
 
And I also placed this in Melodyne. It does look as though there is false vibrato done by whatever effect. But there is nothing averaged as far as pitch for the performance. It is all over the place as far as pitch is concerned.

Cancel the audition and save your time. Again, just my opinion... :)
 
I don't hear auto tune. I hear a shaky, untrained voice. I wouldn't even bother with this "singer". I am not a great singer but I know what a real singer sounds like. Sorry if that sounds harsh but he doesn't have a good voice at all.
 
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