A respectable off-purpose use for a much abused effect

Auto-tune is making me a better singer but not in the more obvious way you would expect.

I am sure you all know what the auto-tune effect is and if not, I can guarantee you’ve heard it. A lot. It’s been around since the 90s but its liberal use was probably most popularized by T-Pain and aped by just about every other pop or hip-hop top-40 artist over the past couple years. The effect corrects pitch and its application can vary from heavy (creating a highly robotic sound) to light (nudging pitch into place in an almost undetectable way). It seems many charting artists are pretty heavy-handed with it. Not long ago, I was in a bar where the radio was on and tuned to a pop station. There were probably 10 songs on maximum rotation (I heard them all twice in a couple hours) and of that 10, 8 employed copious use of the auto-tune effect. And, exactly 8 of the auto-tuned tracks killed any hope of achieving the beer buzz I was after that day. I just couldn’t ignore it. The blaring choruses of teeny-bop cyborg chipmunks made me shudder and it embarrassed me that I have used auto-tune even selectively.

For my first release with LowHero.DLL, FM_Era, I worked vocoder (another robotic effect) into several of the tracks to achieve that retro-futuristic sound. I also applied auto-tune in a few tracks to allow me to carry some notes much longer without waver. Overall, I was very happy with the outcome, that is until the presence of auto-tuned voice reached critical mass, not just with hip-hop and pop tracks but also with pop-culture phenoms like Auto-Tune The News (very clever I admit). Now, I can barely stand to hear discernibly applied auto-tune. Thanks to an iPhone app, I will have no escape from it.

Is auto-tune evil? That depends on who you ask but from my perspective it is just supremely overused.

Auto-tune is quite often used to take make a good vocalist sound great. If the artist sings well but has a few pitchy spots, no problem. Apply auto-tune carefully and the artist will sound much better. Overdo the setting though, and they will sound unnatural and the qualities of their true voice will be lost.

This is where a new use for auto-tune is revealed - as voice trainer.

Auto-tune can be applied as a voice trainer in a couple ways. One technique I use a lot to get my desired vocal quality when recording is to sing my part the best I can then on playback, I apply auto-tune somewhat aggressively. When set aggressively (a faster setting to the initiated), the result is a detectable adjustment to the closest note in the scale. This is the effect that T-Pain fans crave as auto-tune predictably hard-shifts through the notes he sings (T-Pain is actaully a pretty good singer without auto-tune). For my technique however, this hard shift is simply the the truth-teller that I am out of pitch and that I need to record a new take, hopefully singing much better than last time. I do as many vocal takes as it takes for auto-tune not to feel the need to correct my pitch. When auto-tune is happy (no detectable adjustments), this is the take I want. Now, I can either back the setting way down to expose more of my voice or remove the auto-tune effect completely, which is normally what I do. The result is my natural voice singing in very good pitch. I’m ready for X Factor!

The other use is as a true vocal trainer. You just practice over and over, applying auto-tune to tell you where you are missing. Practice, practice, and practice more until you can effortlessly sing like a bird even to auto-tune’s hypercritical ear.

Even a folk singer can make respectable use of this much maligned tool.

Jonathan Chalker