Your experiences experimenting with autotune

The Studio
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You know that autotune sound used by t pain, has anyone incorporated that into the music production…whether working with vocals or synths…
I know its just pitchshifting vocals, but omg that song by fever ray if I had a heart is one of my faves…

So what do you use or have you used it

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I have tried a lot of stuff for vocal mangling, but I don’t have Autotune and often don’t reach the results I would like with vocoder-type stuff. Some tools I like for vocal mangling that can lead to somewhat similar sounds:

  • Zynaptiq Morph (or Melda MMorph, less crisp/defined sound imho bur more options) - you can morph vocals into anything more or less, including melodies
  • Zynaptiq Wormhole - the pitch and warp parameters have to be automated in the DAW
  • wavetable synths with good simple import options, such as Icarus and Infinite Pro. You have to import any vocal fragment you want to use, but than you can do whatever you like with it
  • granulizers that offer some pitch-shifting options such as Uhbik-G

Tools I want to check out:

  • Polyverse Manipulator
  • Zynaptiq version of Orange Vocoder (coming soon I think)
2 Likes
3

Maybe also check out this one:

1 Like
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When i pitchshift vocals it becomes grainy and loses its tempo, I had to vocodex the wet signal and modify it by the dry signal to make it better but still maybe I should try modifying by a synth line…the former idmf user son of Akira suggested melodyne

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Def a problem with the pitchshifter imho! Try different settings or plugins/programs, for instance Ableton warp only works good with complex material if you set the audio file warp attributes to Complex Pro. The results for other modes can be horrible.

Yeah, I haven’t done much with it but for manual editing it should be good.

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Karin Dreijer is amazing!

I think the main reason the pitch effects work so well for her is that she is a very good singer, with an almost perfect sense of pitch. So, she can mix her direct vocal sound in with the re-pitched effect tracks without sounding horrible. Pitch shift is different from autotune, since you can still sing/shift out of key (the shift doesn’t care about tonality, but just pitches incoming frequencies up or down at set intervals).

The remix/remake album “Shaken Up Versions” by The Knife (Karin Dreijer with her brother, Olof) is well worth checking out btw!

I tried working with autotune for a while years ago, back when Cher made the sound famous. I honestly didn’t like the sound of it then, and I still don’t. At this point it’s been over-used so much by the ongoing wave of junkie “rappers”, that I’ll turn off my radio/stream/whatever when I hear the sound of it.

1 Like