When the band heard the result, however, they were incensed – “this sounds way too good! Do it again!” The engineer went back to work, this time tuning “even more artistically,” going so far as to pull the singer’s original performance out of tune here and there to compensate for necessary macro-level tuning changes elsewhere. Undaunted, our engineer pulled up the Auto-Tune plugin inside Pro-Tools and set to work tuning the vocal, to use his words, “artistically” – that is, not perfectly, but enough to keep it from being annoyingly off-key. Complicating matters further was the fact that this band had a decidedly lo-fi, garage-y reputation, making your standard-issue, Glee-grade tuning job decidedly inappropriate. Whereas singers usually tend towards being either consistently sharp or flat (“men go flat, women go sharp” as another engineer explained), in this case the vocalist was all over the map, making it difficult to always know exactly what note they were even trying to hit. Being able to comp, tune, and repair the timing of a vocal take is now a standard skill set among engineers, but in this case things were not going smoothly. Polishing-up vocals is an increasingly common job in the recording business, with some dedicated vocal producers even making it their specialty. Whew! There! Perfect!– JS, Editor-in-ChiefĪ recording engineer once told me a story about a time when he was tasked with “tuning” the lead vocals from a recording session (identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent). Wait, let me clean that up a little bit.so darn badly.no wait, run that back one more time.jjuuuuust a little bit more.so damn badly.
Today, Marshall helps us understand just why we want to shift pitch-time so darn bad.
These fast-forward folks have shared their thinking about everything from Auto-tune to techie manifestos. This is the final article in Sounding Out!‘s April Forum on “Sound and Technology.” Every Monday this month, you’ve heard new insights on this age-old pairing from the likes of Sounding Out! veteranos Aaron Trammelland Primus Luta along with new voices Andrew Salvatiand Owen Marshall.