Get the feel right
Yea, AT is a great little plugin for tuning. But I have to agree with previous posts in many areas.
1. The vocal shouldn't be too far out of tune, otherwise AT won't be able to handle it. A well sung vocal which is generally in pitch can be made to sound better with AT, but a badly sung vocal still sounds bad, no matter what you use on it.
2. By all means pick the right scale and disable the notes your vocalist doesn't use, this will mean that AT only targets the right notes.
3. The feeling in the vocal is truly important. I've worked with singers who sing in tune but lacked feeling, technically things sound great, but the performance lacks that magic (emotion, energy - call it what you like). AT and any other plugin for that matter is totally useless at correcting this.
4. As for vocalists who can't sing in tune, there are things called singing lessons (seriously, they can help). Then again some people still can't sing in tune after having lessons, maybe diplomatically suggesting that they try playing another instrument might work?
5. As for Melodyne, it's an amazing piece of software, which I think is far more complex than Autotune, but also far more versatile and gives extremely good control of pitch, formant, amplitude etc.
I notice that Waves has got a new vocal plugin which does pretty much what Autotune does, I haven't tried it, but some of the reviews I've seen suggest that it's pretty good.
Cheers
Theo C
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