Transparent Vocal Pitch Correction Tutorial

[Rob K]

We're all familiar with music that has been pitch-corrected into oblivion. I would stick my neck out and say that 99% of what you hear on the radio has pitch correction on the vocals. Maybe 100% if you include backing vocals. Some songs that I hear on the radio, I am 100% certain that if I had pitch corrected it, it would have sounded better. This is because some engineers seem to pitch correct with a sledgehammer. I prefer to pitch-correct with a carving knife.

By pitch correction I'm referring to the Melodyne-style manual manipulation of individual notes, rather than the traditional Autotune plugin effect. This tutorial focusses on Cubase's VariAudio pitch correction, but the technique can be applied to Melodyne, Waves Tune, AutoTune Evo, Reaper ReaTune or any of these tools that basically do the same thing.

Before I begin, I'm going to explain the concept behind the technique. A big part of what you could call the "character" of a vocal performance occurs in between the actual notes themselves on what I'm going to call melodic transients. These are the little slides between notes, the tail-offs at the end of notes that have very little to do with the pitch-centre of the note, and everything to do with the emotion of the song. Applying pitch correction to these melodic transients with a sledge hammer approach doesn't work for three reasons:

1) The pitch detection algorithms are often not very good at detecting the exact pitch of a melodic transient (look at how some of the pitch lines drop off the chart)
2) The melodic transient has no pitch centre to correct to anyway!
3) The pitch correction will result in a sound that no singer could physically make, which is going to set off alarm bells to anyone listening with a keen ear.


Step 1 - Listen to the first example, the uncorrected vocal, and follow along on it's representative pitch graph. You should be able to figure out how the blobs correspond to the notes.

01 Original.mp3

01 - Original.PNG

You can hear the word "hear" wobble and notice how it never really hit it's pitch centre, and also how it slides between two notes. Listen to how the pitch slides around the word "crying."

Step 2 - For the sake of exaggeration, I've done a sledgehammer pitch correct by selecting everything, quantizing and straightening the pitch to almost the full extent. Notice how the natural slides between notes become unnaturally jerky (the famous "excessive auto-tune effect")

02 Sledgehammer.mp3

02 - Sledgehammer.PNG

Step 3 - I undo these changes and instead snip each pitch blob at the edges, isolating the pitch centre from the melodic transient. When you see the pitch line stabilise, this is the place to snip.

03 - Isolated pitch centres.PNG

Step 4 - I now highlight only the pitch centres and tune the crap out of them. How much you want to correct is up to you, it depends how bad the original is, and how much vibrato you want to leave on the note. You can be quite brutal with the correction if you want, but don't overdo it if you want to retain some life in your melody. I've probably corrected the word "crying" more than I would in reality, but I hope I've illustrated the point.

04 - Corrected.mp3

04 Corrected.PNG

And you're done! Hope you've found this useful

[jjb]

A nice treatment! Thanks.

[shackman]

Thanks. USing Samplitude's pitch corrector which is way more powerful than I first thought.

I HAD clocked onto the fact that the "transients" were not places to tackle, but I HADN'T worked out the "pitch centre" principle you introduce.

I shall try that on my next rescue!

[Rob K]

Hey guys, glad you found it helpful!

An obvious extension of this technique is that you can get quite creative about how much of the note you want to fix. So lets say you've got a relatively long note and you love the vocal technique, and fixing it too much will kill the vibe. Just correct a smaller section of the note so that it still hits the pitch centre for a moment but any other wobbles are left intact. If you make good choices, you'll strengthen the melody and even a trained ear will struggle to hear any pitch correction going on at all!

[the evil]

this was awesome because ive been sucking at this. Definately gonna have to give it a go again. thanks

[bobbybovine]

this was awesome because ive been sucking at this. Definately gonna have to give it a go again. thanks

Ditto on that one

[brandondrury]

3) The pitch correction will result in a sound that no singer could physically make, which is going to set off alarm bells to anyone listening with a keen ear.

The exception to that is young guy today who's only heard this sound for the past 10 years and acclimated to it to the point of it being "normal" to him.

Great thread!

What's the shortcut to make the "cut" in each blob? That's on my to-do list, but I haven't gotten around to mastering the pitch correction thingy yet.

Brandon

[DLChuckles]

Cool, I didn't know that reatune was a pitch correcter. I thought it was just like a guitar tuner. Best thing I've learned today. btw you called it reacomp in the op. fyi.

[aj113]

I use pitch correction on most vocals. I do pretty much the same as Rob but I don't use a graph, I just use my ears to find the part to correct. It's not so difficult to hone in on the offending note once you've done a few. One thing I have noticed is that pitching down is significantly more noticeable aurally than pitching up.

[m24p]

Cool, I didn't know that reatune was a pitch correcter. I thought it was just like a guitar tuner. Best thing I've learned today. btw you called it reacomp in the op. fyi.

Yeah it's what I typically use. And I independently discovered a similar technique about only correcting certain parts.

[Rob K]

btw you called it reacomp in the op. fyi.

Well spotted- Obviously I meant ReaTune. I've corrected that now!

The exception to that is young guy today who's only heard this sound for the past 10 years and acclimated to it to the point of it being "normal" to him.

What's the shortcut to make the "cut" in each blob? That's on my to-do list, but I haven't gotten around to mastering the pitch correction thingy yet.

Annoyingly there isn't a shortcut to go into cutting mode (you'd think it'd be "3" but it's not). Under the VariAudio tab on the left of the sample editor, you have to click the "segments" button to go into that mode. It doesn't look like anything has happened, but you'll find when you hover over the blob, the pointer will turn to scissors and a thin horizontal line appears at the bottom of the blob showing you where you're allowed to cut. Cubase is clever and doesn't actually let you cut in the middle of a transient. I'd highly recommend diving into the manual as there are a few other tricks you can do - it's worth a read.

segments.PNG

[T_O_A_D]

Nice post. I pretty much had that figured out the same way with Reatune.

On my last Bash I had one spot in the song that I was struggling with.

So I just fixed the exact spot, instead of the hole note.

Eventually after singing along with the corrected note, I was able to just sing a new track and leave it all natural.

For training purposes I used the sledge hammer on the entire thing, and found it ruined the show.

Auto tune could tell right off was a unnatural sounding beast, so went straight into the Manual mode.

Reaper has a video over there that explains how to use the thing, is how I got it figured out.

And now with your post its even more understandable.
Thanks

[brandondrury]

Annoyingly there isn't a shortcut to go into cutting mode (you'd think it'd be "3" but it's not). Under the VariAudio tab on the left of the sample editor, you have to click the "segments" button to go into that mode. It doesn't look like anything has happened, but you'll find when you hover over the blob, the pointer will turn to scissors and a thin horizontal line appears at the bottom of the blob showing you where you're allowed to cut. Cubase is clever and doesn't actually let you cut in the middle of a transient. I'd highly recommend diving into the manual as there are a few other tricks you can do - it's worth a read.

I remember trying to hit 3 the other day and it didn't work. It was similar to that let-down feeling you get when your break pedal doesn't work.

Yeah, I do need to hit the manual on this one. I tend to go in stages depending on my level of overload. With the finalization of the Slate Digital Cup script, I'm full-blown square wave saturated. Things will slow down in a week.

Brandon

[Emma]

Thanks for posting this Rob.. I have been having a playaround with VariAudio and it's an amazing programme. Reading the manual tells the theory stuff but doesn't really cover the practical application. Having the audio files to demonstrate is awesome ta!

[miscend]

Thanks alot for this tutorial. I have had a go at it myself on the same file. But because my DAW doesn't have graphical pitch correction, I have had to use automation to try emulate your tutorial. How natural sounding is it?


03 Pitch Corrected.mp3

[Rob K]

Hi miscend,

You've done a good job on the first section "You won't hear me." However I heard a nasty bit of correction at the beginning of the word "crying." Try using your technique to only allow the correction to kick in once the note stabilises on the "y" of crying!

[ragrant]

I am 100% in agreement, keep the pitch correction hidden! Melodyne is a pretty powerful program. If you are really serious, you might check out David Andris tutorial at macprovideo.com. He is Celemony's lead specialist guy, it gets into some of the more finicky features, like formants and S issues.