Pitch correction cheating or an everday tool?

Well the art of pitch correction has been around for nearly 40 years in some shape or form.. E.g. Varispeed, Eventide, Autotune, Melodyne.

After most big produced records for many years getting treatment, in some form or another do you think it is now an everday tool? Or do you think it should still be disregarded?

Myself, I'm quite lucky I probably have a 99.5% hit rate with my pitch ( and the rest is probably not noticeable).. I recorded my Demo with no autotune but that .5% may be what stands between success and failure as we now live in a world of superhuman sounding vocalists. As a vocalist you may be an excellent singer but can you do it without any engineering aid? Does it bother you? Do you think recordings sounded better with slight mistakes e.g the 60's an 70's?

I don't think any good singer needs pitch correction at all. If you're 99.5% on pitch, that's basically perfect, and way adequate enough to be successful in the music industry.

If you suck, then pitch correction would be required, but then why would anyone who sucks be in the industry in the first place? It is very annoying that there are so many people who are though.

And yes, the 60s-70s are my favourite music times.

i would like to know how you determine you have 99.5% pitch accuracy down to the tenth of one-percent.

Exactly, lol

It would have been more believable if you said 99.9% pitch rather then 99.5%

Exact pitch is overrated anyway. If you're a decent singer and the note is well within your range then you should be able to have fairly good pitch.

Stuff like Autotune only sounds good on heavily-produced music. IMO, I think Autotune actually kills the unique quality of a singer's voice.

Things like vibrato would be lost in the process. The natural timbre and overtones would become skewed as well.

99.5% hit rate...how'd you calculate that, lol. But back to the topic, no good singer needs pitch correction IMO. Sad thing is nowadays, pretty much everything you hear on the radio is auto-tuned, doesn't matter what genre. You gotta look at it from the record company's point of view. They're paying big bucks for studio time for their artists and don't want to shell out the cash for "human perfection". The finished product of a vocal track is pretty much a comp of at least 3 or 4 takes, the best from each being spliced into one, and after that, any other slight imperfection is auto-tuned.

If you're auto-tuning your demos...that would be cheating

It would have been more believable if you said 99.9% pitch rather then 99.5% Exact pitch is overrated anyway. If you're a decent singer and the note is well within your range then you should be able to have fairly good pitch. Stuff like Autotune only sounds good on heavily-produced music. IMO, I think Autotune actually kills the unique quality of a singer's voice. Things like vibrato would be lost in the process. The natural timbre and overtones would become skewed as well.

+1

Oh, a good example of someone who NEEDED the auto-tune is the "Friday" girl from the "Worst Song Ever" thread! That {censored}'s all over her vocals...

Well I do production and engineering anything to make money, so I ran my voice through melodyne a fair few times to see the results, out of a thousand notes I was nearly a semitone out on 5 of them.

Tbh I never really noticed, things like vibrato can be left out of the pitch correction, but thing about it you will never sound as perfect as the guys on the cd, you can elongate words you can create near flawless harmonies and it is pretty much unheard of not to use it in the studio.

On a record people are made to sound nearly superhuman, I have never heard anyone sound live like they do on the cd, regardless of talent... so to disregard what it can do for you are you shooting yourself in the foot? if done right you won't know its ever happened.

A lot of singers are auto-tuned live nowadays too. Moderation is the key!

Josh Groban does a very good job of sounding exactly like his CD recordings. It's quite extraordinary.

he's very well-trained for years and years.

the difference is, most singers don't have the same level of training as josh, which is why they cant pull of recorded stuff live

Celine Dion's another one, grant it, it's not my style of music, but she's one of the few singers out there that actually sound better live than on CD.

He's awesome! and I've actually never heard Celine live even though I like her quite a bit. Off to Youtube!

When performing live, pitch correction is a big turn-off to my ears. It's severely disappointing to hear the fringing sound it creates.

In a studio it can be acceptable if you for example have managed to create a truly awesome bit of vocals but sang off-key for just a fraction of a second, ruining all of it. Even in this context I don't really like it much.

Agreed. Autotune has been hyped as a way to make good vocals available to anyone, but it ain't so. Most musicians can with a little practice get close enough to the correct pitch, and then autotune won't have very much to do. When it's engaged it creates a signature sound that is easily recognizable, and if you're not doing music that suits it (heavily produced, as Davie rightly notes), it sounds awful.

From an engineering standpoint, do it right and you won't be able to tell it's autotuned.. I'm talking a small percentage of a semitone off and it can add a sense of dullness to a mix..

If you send me a track without making the best out of it, I would just class it as an amateur production.. Close enough today isn't good enough.. Like the beatles song's if they were recorded a month ago, people would be confused by the production.. I have done blind test's and all sort's of things, because of my sense of pride and purism.. But I can't compete with a machine lol!! neither can others..

I'm not talking robotic sounds and mass manipulation (Like Cher and T-Pain), if it get's to that point you should do it again or get someone else to do it for you.. But there is pretty much nobody nowaday's that doesn't use it in one form or another and they have used it for nearly 40 years now..

IMHO if you are to stand up to the rest of them, to get a really polished sounding vocal you don't have much of a choice, the consumer market has been hearing this before I was born even in the 70's with varispeed.. It's just that it's now open for everyone to buy.

P.S quite contrary to what people beleive, you still have to be a decent singer to get it work or it sticks out like a saw thumb.

Very true in pop, r'n'b, and many other styles, but not in all styles of music. The guys I love (Dylan, Young, Waits, Springsteen, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, etc.) don't use it, that's for sure!

Everyday tool, used sparingly/correctly... Everyone here is not only an individual singer, some of us are singers, who record other singers? And everyone is not a great, and sometimes, not even a good singer... So pitch correction, can be a very handy tool.

What's important IMO is,

1. Comping, have them sing 5 to 6 takes "at least"

2. Go through and listen to the phrasing in each take and build the best vocal track you can.

3. Listen to that best track, and see where it may need to be edited. One of the most common edits (even through this says "pitch correction") is editing vibrato? Many singers use too much, in too many places. Vocal editing SW allows you to go in and pick where to make it more pronounced, by allowing the engineer to make it "less pronounced" in other places.

I use Celemony's "Melodyne" which I think is the best. I've used autotune, and vvocal as well, but I think Melodyne is the most powerful.

Fleetwood Mac sound much the same live as they do in the studio and also in the "behind the scenes" mini jam type sessions and studio work...and they're not perfect or amazing singers (Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie or Lindsey Buckingham I'm talking about here), but they DO sound the same live...just different in terms of the uniqueness a live setting brings...maybe a slightly different way of singing something, etc, you know? But still as GOOD as in the studio.

Same with Kate Bush. And Grace Slick MOSTLY when she wasn't too drunk.

I can guarantee you, touch ups will have occured at some point in the recording process..

I agree, I like Fleetwood mac but still if it was recorded today for the consumer market.. People would be like what the hell is this? Why do the vocals sound weird? Especially the teen to mid 30's market that have been listening to active pitch and relative note length / elastic audio editing all there life... Point I'm getting at is it's been going on for so long now in Pop / Rock / Metal / Country every genre of the mass consumer market, that it doesn't sound right not to do it

Oh yeah on a side note, the style of mixing for quite a while is dry mixing.. In the yester year, they used quite a bit of either reverb or delay that would cover up mistakes, even the fact that the quality of the recording was rubbish masked clarity which you would find mistakes digitally.. So vocals are under more scrutiny as everything can be heard better and clearer..

On a side note I just listend to knights in white satin by the moodies.. I love this song but scrutanised his vocals, he waver's out of tune in places and there are nuances and artifacts that are not clean, like most songs from the era it's swammped in reverb .. Now if I heard him live I would be in awe, but if this was a CD released today he would either get kicked to the kirb or would be told to do it properly by his label.. Because production wise it sounds like a start out band, especially on the vox..

Robots win.

Love her or hate her (her music I mean; by most accounts she is a very nice person) the girl can *sing*.