PERFECT pitched vocals...

Anyone have any direct experience with extreme vocal tuning? I'm currently working on a project with a rock band, and the singer is... well let's just say he's got personality, and a cool sound... but the pitch is a disaster... I recently heard a song on the radio "#1 with a bullet" I think by "Fall Out Boy"... the vocal sound and processing is incredible. I've heard this kind of sound before (Blink 182's Anthem Pt. 2), (Story of The Year's "Until The Day I Die") It has become fairly common in modern rock. The sound is a kind of overdriven effect, you can hear the harmonic distortion, and an almost total lack of dynamics in the vocal level (a dersirable thing for this sound)... but the really cool part is the pitch. It's dead on. Unhumanly so. Almost sounds like it has been set EXACTLY via midi or something... I've heard some of these bands live, and can ASSURE you that this is a studio trick, and NOT their singing ability. I know Auto-Tune can be triggered via midi, and have tried this, but cannot achieve this kind of effect. Any ideas? I'd love to be able to get this sound. Thanks all for the input. Jon

Someone else please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost 100% certain this can be done with Melodyne. I'm hedging here only because I haven't used Melodyne in EXACTLY this way. What you are describing sounds possibly like pitch manipulation combined with another function of Melodyne. The other function I'm thinking it could be is transferring the properties of one sound source to another. That's how you could get the other than human quality on the vocals. (Maybe a synth lead or guitar track was used. Just examples.) I should add that I never bothered to get the Ignition Pack, and I don't have the Pro Tools version of Melodyne. The comments above are based only upon the use of the current versions of Melodyne Studio over the last few years.

I am 100% sure this can be done with Autotune in graphical mode. I have worked extensively with Autotune (and love it), and can assure you that you can get the "unhuman" pitch you desire from it, although it can take some serious time/trial and error to do if the pitch is all over the place. To make it easy on yourself get the pitch as close as you can before you get started, or you can get some very bizarre sounding results.

Use Auto-Tune's Graphical Mode, and ignore the note reference lines. Just use your ear and shift curves till it sounds perfectly in-tune. It might not LOOK in-tune, but that's okay. I've read that Melodyne produces less artifacts/harmonic distortion than Auto-Tune when pitch correcting. I've never tried it myself so I can't support these claims, but that sounds counterproductive to the effect you want.

Here are some threads that may help you: Shane

I am constantly tuning vocals, and have several clients that just hire me for vocal tuning. I used to consider myself an AutoTune master and got very good results, but I pretty much use nothing but Melodyne now. There is just so much more you can do with it, with much greater control. It will succesfully tune problem lines that give AutoTune fits, and I love that your tuning work is saved as a session and you can return to tweak it. You do have to take the time to learn it, there are lots of little tricks. Most of the top profesional ProTools guys I know use it as well. Autotune is still the way to go for quickly tuning bg vocals in auto mode. Having said that, I just bought Waves Tune. If your computer is fast enough, the sound quality is excellent. STeve

I have a problem with Autotune, sometimes it cant find the real tune so it does not show the lines `? what can I do? Klaus