PLUGIN WEEK 2023: Now that we've established that it isn't responsible for the death of popular music, it's time to explore Antares Auto-Tune, one of the most audibly recognisable effects in modern music production.
Capable not only of fixing the odd bum note, but also drastically altering the pitch, tone and timbre of any vocal recording, it's a plugin that's practically helped to create whole new genres.
Let's fire it up and take a look at Auto-Tune's many capabilities.
Step 1: Antares Auto-Tune is a remarkably dexterous suite of voice-manipulating software, and is now capable of far more, particularly via the family of sub-plugins such as Auto-Key and EFX.
- Read more: How to make a bad vocal sound good
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Step 2: We’ve got a demo we’re working on, with a vocal melody concocted of samples. However the samples are dry and entirely out of tune and roughly in tempo with our track pitch.
Step 3: Opening Antares Auto-Tune, the first thing we do is snap our vocal track to the correct pitch key using Auto-Key. This recent addition to the Antares family intelligently discerns our root key. We can then send the key to Auto-Tune.
Step 4: Setting the Re-Tune speed higher can make our vocal snap more sharply to the key of the track. Cranking it right up, and reducing Humanize controls gets us something more aggressively tuned.
Step 5: Using the Flex Tune control can dial back some of the harshness for the first part of the vocal, but we want to keep a more electronic time for the second part.
Step 6: For this second section, we’ve opened the Auto-Tune EFX plugin, and applied a Duet effect. We can add up to four effects here, including spatial effects, to expand our now quite pretty vocal into something that’s starting to sound much cooler.
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