TUTORIAL
SOFTWARE TIPS: AUTOTUNE EVO We’ve all used AutoTune at some point, but hands up who could do with a private refresher course? Text: Graeme Hague
From behind the mixing console there appears to be three kinds of vocalists: people who can sing, people who can’t, and girls attractive enough to be unreasonably given the benefit of the doubt. You might be one of those who lament the over-use of pitch correction, but down at the bottom of the studio food chain many of us are often working with clients whose ambitions, sadly, far out-strip their talents. Personally, I prefer to be gently encouraging – then take the money and run. Which means reaching for AutoTune’s Evo plug-in on a regular basis. Now I know I’m not alone in this. I also know Evo is the kind of complex plug-in that is best operated by an engineer who uses it every day. For those who use it infrequently, meanwhile, operating it properly often requires a quick refresher course. Since nothing inspires confidence less than the sight of an operator rummaging through a drawer for an instruction manual, here are some tips on using AutoTune Evo that can get you fast, accurate results like you’re an expert. WHEN AND WHERE TO USE IT Evo has two modes of operation and two ways you can use them: Automatic Mode and Graphical Mode. Both of these can be either inserted over a track to process in real time or applied as a permanent audio edit in the waveform editing program of your choice. Forget Graphical Mode for the moment. Automatic Mode is the quickest and easiest way to save your bacon. It functions just fine as a realtime plug-in insert. In fact, it works so well that you might wonder what all the fuss is about here. There are, however, some crucial settings that need attention – settings that you might have been tempted to ignore, because Evo does seem to kind of work anyway. Without them, listen closely and you will hear those lilting artefacts that let the pitch correction cat out of the bag, so to speak. BASIC SETTINGS The first setting involves choosing the Input type, ranging from ‘Soprano’ down to ‘Bass Instrument’. Obviously, you’re not going to choose Bass when your vocalist sounds like Kate Bush, but you must tweak the setting down to ‘Alto/Tenor’ or ‘Low Male’, if need be. Importantly, Antares has developed individual algorithms for each input type, not merely applied some nominal tweak to a global effect. We’re talking chalk and cheese here. So choose carefully, or at the very least, experiment. Either way, you can achieve a vastly different result from what seems like a trifling adjustment.
Similarly, the settings for Key and Scale can sound like they’re not having much of an impact at first. The reason for this is often that you’re dealing in bogstandard keys like D, G or A major, which share a lot
of common notes. Still, pinpointing the right key and scale will always help and, in some cases, it’s vital. For example, compare the C major and C minor keys. One includes the note A, while the other sports an A flat. Like MIDI quantising, Evo is endeavouring to shuffle the crap notes to the nearest correct pitch in your chosen scale, and with an incorrect key setting it can easily push a tone in the wrong direction; sometimes to a pitch that doesn’t belong in the scale at all. Don’t panic, a knowledge of musical theory isn’t a prerequisite for using Evo, but identifying the proper key is. Make sure you figure it out one way or another and select the key appropriately.
ALL TOGETHER NOW Like I said, these are basic settings that are often ignored, because they don’t seem to make much difference in generic pop music – definitely not true! Combined carefully together, the four parameters of Input, Key, Scale and Retune will do a much improved job on any fixable pitch problem, particularly the Retune Speed, which, while it doesn’t actually fix the problem, can cleverly move past it. Automatic Mode will do the rest. But if all that has failed you and things are still sounding unhappy you’ll have to try Graphical Mode. Now, unfortunately, we’re about to get serious.
By the way, in Automatic mode an option is available to Bypass or Remove notes from a scale, further confusing things for people without a music theory background, but it’s easy. Bypassing a chosen note allows it – and anything close to it – to slip through unchanged. If you have something deliberately sung or played off-pitch, it will stay that way. Removing notes prevents Evo from shifting the pitch to somewhere drastically incorrect when the original material is performed particularly badly. For instance, if a sung word should be pitched at C, but is horribly more like D and gets ‘fixed’ upwards, then removing D from the scale forces Evo to choose the next best thing – the much more tolerable C.
GRAPHICAL MODE Graphical Mode provides tools for nitty-gritty pitch correction, like cutting files into small sections for precise work or grabbing notes and forcing them to pitches that Automatic Mode wouldn’t consider in a mad fit. You might call it ‘Desperation Mode’, or coming from a completely different angle, ‘Creative Mode’, since you certainly can use it creatively. The aforementioned parameters of Input, etc don’t apply here except for Retune Speed, because the theory is that you know exactly what you want to achieve in terms of pitch. In this operational mode, you’re going to literally draw in the new tonal and pitch data yourself. Here it’s possible to isolate notes and adjust the Retune Speed for each one; an alternative means of working with files where the Humanise function simply doesn’t cut it.
RETUNE SPEED – THE INFAMOUS ‘CHER’ EFFECT Retune Speed can be the difference between naturalsounding pitch correction and something clearly processed or, in the case of Cher’s 1998 hit, Believe, the Retune Speed set a benchmark for deliberately mashing things up. Nobody sings a perfectly pitched note immediately. Vocalists slide up and down between notes until they (hopefully) reach their pitch. The danger is that Evo sees this tonal sliding as a fault that needs correcting. (That’s what Cher’s producer did by using those extreme settings – which also contributed to it being a hit, of course).
Retune Speed adjusts how quickly Evo reacts to incorrect pitch: a slow setting effectively waits for the singer to reach their projected target, while a fast value fixes short notes quickly. Another way to approach it is to set the Retune Speed to get past a flat (or sharp) note in a hurry. Where the wheels can really fall off is in the situation where a certain Retune Speed works well for quick lyrics but trashes long ones and vice versa. The Retune Speed setting really needs to be trialled by the user to find the appropriate reaction time, and the results can vary a lot. Otherwise, check out the Humanise control, which automatically applies an amount of compromise. If the song’s arrangement makes things too difficult you’re better off getting away from the Insert slots, opening Evo in an edit window and processing different sections of the file accordingly.
The most confusing aspect of Graphical Mode is the process to begin editing. The ‘Track Pitch’ button is, I think, unfortunately named. I’ll explain. First, select the audio you want to re-pitch in your host application – let’s use ProTools. It can be an entire track (region) if you like. Next you hit the Track Pitch button and play the audio with the ProTools transport. What happens here is the audio is recorded (or ‘tracked’) into Evo for you to process. The Track Pitch button is telling you to track the data in, not referring to any particular ‘track’ – get it? I know I might be banging on about this, but as someone (like many of us) for whom reading the instruction manual is considered an embarrassing last resort, this initially tricked the hell out of me. The result is a squiggly, red line that represents the pitch of the audio. It’s red and squiggly, because remember, no-one ever sings a perfect tone. How much it squiggles and where it starts and ends in relation to correct pitch is now your problem. To start work you can choose ‘Make Curve’ or ‘Make Notes’. Make Curve will generate and display a green line that represents what will happen to your audio as you perform edits. Initially, this will be exactly the same as the red line and overlayed directly on it. Why? Because so far you haven’t done anything