On-the-spot tuning

- [Instructor] Now we all know that there are tons of ways to tune your vocals, but let me show you sort of a quick way that you can approach it that's going to be a little bit more foolproof than going for some of these presets that a lot of people have. Obviously, manual editing with something like Revoice or Melodyne is in order for final mixing, but what if you just need a little bit of help, or what if you just want to get things a little bit more in place for your demo? I'm going to go ahead and edit this out real quick, and I'm going to start with some Auto-Tune tips that I like. And it's nothing super revolutionary. I just use a different set of settings than many people do, and I want to show you what a lot of engineers I know do that works really well for me. First of all, we're going to bring in a high pass filter, and we're just going to get out some of those low plosives and things like that because those are things that will confuse the tuner, and we just want to make it as simple as possible. Now, let's call up Auto-Tune. First we'll have a listen without it. He's pretty close, he's a great singer. (electronic music) ♪ Yeah, time has changed, ♪ ♪ Lovers train for the better ♪ ♪ For the better ♪ ♪ Yeah I made mistakes ♪ ♪ Made you break ♪ ♪ Turned you crazy ♪ ♪ Know I misbehaved ♪ Alright, so he's very, very close. It might be nice to push it a little more, it's kind of a pop thing, so we can have some fun with it. All I'm going to do is bring it in, and I'm going to find the key of the tune, okay? And this is in E-flat minor, so I'm going to go ahead and hit "set minor," and I had already done that, so it's right there. But what I'd like to do is actually use these "remove" buttons, as opposed to using a scale up top here. Because what that allows me to do is customize it, and I can also omit certain pitches from being tuned or from being considered. So if you omit them in the bypass over here, it'll ignore them. If you remove them, then it won't let the singer hit those notes. And if you're just doing something sort of gentle, then you want to have kind of a mellow retune speed. As this retune speed goes down, we get a more and more robotic type of sound. Let's take a listen. (song replays) (singer's voice becomes lightly robotic) So as we push it a little bit, it makes it a little bit more robotic, and if we push "humanize" up a little bit, it'll fight that. I like "humanize" maybe around 40. And then for a singer like this, a retune speed right around 40 is going to be good as well. We're just trying to catch little things here and there. We can make a bit of a decision on them later if we want, but it also might sound really good. So let's take a listen. (song replays) Alright, so that's sounding pretty good. If we wanted to, we could get rid of a note like the B in here, it doesn't seem to be hit too much. (song replays) So that's pretty good, letting him sort of slide by that B there. Sounds pretty good. You may not love it, that's okay, it's not your tune. (chuckles) That's always a good answer. Someone has an issue with your tuning or anything, really. But honestly, you use it to your taste, is all I'm trying to say here. I don't mean to be too cheeky. But use it to your taste, use your ears. There are no hard and fast rules with something like tuning vocals, you really do have to use your ear. If I say to someone, "Hey, can you tune this super tight?" or if I say to someone, "Can you tune this not so tight?" just get them in there a little bit more, there's a big difference, but there's no secret formula for that. That's largely just using your ears. Now what if you want to go more robotic? Well, there are a few ways to do this, but one of the ones that I really like is using a second Auto-Tune. So we got him in the ballpark over here, but we can also use a second Auto-Tune and bring our retune speed in super low, okay? And what that'll do is that'll add some robotic edges to it, and let's just go and set all of these. (song replays) (voice becomes more robotic) Okay, we're getting there. (voice becomes even more robotic) Push it up to choosing, maybe get it sounding a little sweeter. (song replays with lightly robotic vocals) And if you want, you can add some "natural" vibrato. And I'm doing air quotes when I say "natural," because it can often make things sound sort of unnatural but in a pleasing way if you like. "Humanize" you'd want to keep pretty low for something like this, but let's get in the ballpark. Let's start using these "remove" guys, 'cause that's really the key, and you can really have a lot of fun with this. My whole thing, if you're going for a robotic-type Auto-Tune sound, is you want to remove as many as possible and still get the whole thing happening. So let's see what happens if we remove B and A-sharp as a start. (song replays) Okay, he's jumping around a bit. (voice dramatically jumps pitches in melody) Whoa, okay, so I think that A-sharp is actually important to the end there. Let's see what happens when we remove this F. (song replays) Alright, so that F is our buddy. If you want to get it super, super tight with this type of thing, sometimes what you have to do is Melodyne beforehand so that you can really gas the retune speed super hard, and you can get something that's a little bit more robotic, that's a very common thing that I do. Often using just two Auto-Tunes, it doesn't catch things in sort of the right way, especially with this first passage, 'cause he's just going up and down on this whole step here. (song replays) So there's a lot going on in there that's kind of being interpreted in one direction or another, and so it's important, again, to use your ears, but sometimes you do have to Melodyne before you Auto-Tune to get it to do exactly what you want to do. Another alternative is to just use Melodyne and really flatten everything. But again, it's all a matter of taste. If I was recording someone who wanted to do a super Auto-Tuned-out performance, we'd sort of decide on what our notes were going to be, and generally with those styles of music, we don't have things that are quite so note-y like this is. And I've gotten it, in a lot of sessions, some of the best-sounding modern Auto-Tune sounds, I've gotten it down to maybe three notes that I'm allowing through, and if you have someone sing into that, then your system can handle that. Then they can really play, and it's a lot of fun, and that's when you can get into that sort of Kanye-type area. And it can be really, really nice. So set it to taste, that's the most important thing. Use your ears with Auto-Tune. We're going to stick with one for now, but I just wanted to kind of dip my toe into that extra Auto-Tuned-type vibe just to show you another side of things. Because again, it's just a tool. A lot of singers ask me, "Hey, what's your thought "on Auto-Tune and Melodyne?" It's just a tool. It can be a creative tool, it can be a helpful tool. It's totally up to how you use it. Just make sure you're communicating with your artist.