Perfect vocal tuning..Fast!!It's time to figure this out.

[Stratman]

Many of us PT's folks make some side money from tuning vocals on pop, rock and various styles of music.

It seems that now, the standard is that every singer has to sing perfectly in tune. Most of the singers in modern pop and rock (and any other genre you would like to add here) have no clue how to do this. One of the reasons of this is the fact that, they are aware that we can tune them, so the discipline of singing in tune does not have the priority that it used to have in the studio.

OK - enough 21st century production wining. We don't all get to work with Stevie Wonder.

PT's 5.1 has Beat Detective..this is a dream come true (if it works as promised) for us PT's folk that quantize drums as another side line.

The next phase is a having a vocal tuning system that is just as efficent and time saving - but for now we have to use the plugins and various methods we can to make the vocal tuning process as perfect and as invisible as possible.

Here is my method: What's yours?

I use two plugins on my insert on the vox comp track in this order:

1.) Waves Mechanics "Pitch Doctor"
2.) Antares "Auto Tune"

I then bus this track to a track called "AutoTune".

But before I do that, I bounce a stereo ref track of the instrumental track, fly it back into 2 new tracks in the session and then nudge it back about 4200 samples so I can compensate for the 89ms + delay that PitchDoctor and AutoTune incur.

As we all know, AutoTune does some great stuff as far as tuning vocals go until you try to tune wide vibratos or raspy or whispered vocals. This is where I use PitchDoctor and use the "Manual pitch change" in the "automation" section in the plugin.

If there are parts of the vocals that "AutoTune" is not dealing with, I use the "Manual" pitch correction in "Pitch Doctor" with automaction in PT's and then use "AutoTune" (because it is the second plugin in the insert chain) to give me the pitch visual to confirm that the pitch is correct. Then I have to slide the corrected tracks back to there aligned position to drag them up to the vocal comp track.

Does anyone out there have a more efficent way of doing this process? Does anyone really care?

Tuning vocals is one of the most brutal tasks I feel we have to do in PT's. After a day of tuning vocals my brain hurts from having to tune and compensate for flat or sharp singing.

Does anyne out there have a way to make it less painful and still accurate. I only use the "graphic" mode in AutoTune so please do not recommend "Auto" in AutoTune.

Cheers