Recording - August 2014 - 8

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When does Pitch Correction become Pitch Triage?
Dear Joe Albano: I am writing after reading your online article
"The Ups and Downs of Pitch Correction" (available at
www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/259.html) and
I am hoping that you will be kind enough to either answer a question for me, or to please steer me in the right direction. I tell people, half-kidding and half-seriously, that the only thing worse
than my guitar-playing is my singing; I literally can not carry a
tune in a bucket. It may even be a family problem because no one
in my family can sing or carry a tune in any way.
My question to you is, supposing I am playing a song in the
key of E or G or any other key, is there something that I can
sing into-a software program or hardware device-that will
"correct" my pitch to a pre-set key, to let me sing on key and
therefore grant me independence from trying to find demo
singers?
Thank you very much for your time & consideration.
Gratefully,
Norman L Beberman
via email

Joe Albano replies:
Hi Norman: Good to hear from you! I can commiserate
with you-I'm also a non-singer. Fortunately, nowadays there
are plenty of tools that address pitch issues, as I mentioned
in the article you referred to.
Although that piece is a few years old, the options
described in it are still among the best tools for seamless
pitch correction, but these days they're joined by plenty of
other pitch-correction processors. At this point, pretty much
all the major DAWs include pitch processing in two forms-
plug-in-based correction, as my original article covered, and
pitch editing (like Melodyne), which can be applied to recorded audio tracks automatically. Pitch editing includes restricting notes to a particular musical key, either automatically or
manually on a note-by-note basis.
In all of the realtime options, the trick to keeping this
processing invisible is the response time setting (or however it's labeled in your software). Set it too fast and you get
the familiar Auto-Tune special effect; set it just right (by
ear) and you have a natural-sounding in-tune performance.
While pretty much every correction program can restrict
pitch to a specific musical key, this function needs to be used
carefully. As I'm sure you know, vocal melodies and performances often have passing notes and flourishes which might
include notes that are not part of the scale for that key, and
often modulations occur that would necessitate a change to
the key setting. I'd be inclined to leave the Key set to
Chromatic during recording, and deal with those considerations in playback.

Now, on the one hand you discuss replacing a demo
singer, which implies a demo recording that you can pitchcorrect after the fact. But when you say "something I can
sing into", I get the impression that what you mean is something that will correct your pitch live as you perform, as
opposed to after the fact in mixing.
Most of the plug-ins I'm familiar with have enough latency (lag in timing when monitoring live through the plug-in)
to make them unsuitable for live use. Antares used to make
a hardware version of Auto-Tune, now discontinued-
though that same technology may still be available, under
license, in the TASCAM TA-1VP. These days, with the common use of laptops on stage, Antares (apparently) has a
specific plug-in version instead-Auto-Tune Live-that's
set up for low-latency operation, to be used on live performances as the recording's going down.
If the DAW allows for it, you might even be able to print the
corrected vocals, although I wouldn't (or at least would also
record the uncorrected vocals on their own track at the same
time), in case you need to fine-tune the corrections after the
recording's done. If you need to hear the corrected pitch in
headphones as you sing it, this product might do the trick.
There are probably other options out there as well, but
with the Auto-Tune Live plug-in or any live pitch-correction
processing, there would be a few caveats. One issue could
be that you'd still hear the uncorrected vocal internally, in
your head, while the corrected one is heard in the headphones. Turning up the headphone level to dominate would
be the solution, though I know that some singers depend on
the acoustic sound of their voice when performing.
Another potential issue is that, although the plug-in is
designed to correct pitch without introducing significant
latency (as the mixdown version likely will), there'll still be
the DAW's own latency to contend with. As you probably
know, that is a user setting (DAW Rec/Play buffer size) that's
subject to the limitations of the computer and interface
hardware and the OS and DAW software in use. As long as
the specifics of the rig (it's a trial-and-error setting) allow the
buffers to be set to 32 or 64 samples, or at most 128 samples,
then a real-time pitch correction option should be feasible.
The last caveat is that, while all these tools can fix out-oftune issues, none can address quality-of-tone issues. If the
vocal tone is weak, thin, or tentative, then the best you'll end
up with is a perfectly pitched but weak-sounding vocal. The
key is to shoot for the best vocal sound you can achieve, and
let the processing and editing options handle pitch (and timing) issues-still within reasonable limits, of course!
I hope this helps a little. Good luck, and if you find a solution that works for you, let me know-I probably need it as
much as or more than you do! Cheers-JA

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RECORDING August 2014

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