Home Brew Audio

Home Brew Audio

Auto-Tune

Vocal Pitch Correction – Is It Wrong?

by 5 Comments

This is very interesting.  I posted a question here a few days ago to get some opinions and it started rather a heated stir on Twitter.  The question was whether it was wrong to employ pitch correction (typically using Auto-Tune) on vocals in a recording project.  Actually I may have left out the specification of its use in recording (BTW I think using it for live performance IS a bit of a cheat).  Here is the question I posed:

Auto-Tune – Good or Bad?

OK. This is something I want to hear your opinions about, because I had someone say they didn’t want me to use Auto-Tune on their vocals.
What is that? Is Auto-Tune evil? Or is it the holy grail?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
I still want to hear your comments about this.  But I also wanted to post a link to today’s article at About.com’s home recording section, which asks the question: Is Pitch Correction Cheating?  Interesting juxtaposition of topics.  Here is what they have to posit on the question:
http://homerecording.about.com/b/2011/10/18/is-pitch-correction-cheating.htm

Auto-Tune – Good or Bad?

by Leave a Comment

OK. This is something I want to hear your opinions about, because I had someone say they didn’t want me to use Auto-Tune on their vocals for her recording project.
What is that? Is Auto-Tune evil? Or is it the holy grail?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
I wrote an article spelling out my thoughts about it here: Auto-Tune – Any Tool Can Be Abused

What Did We Use To Record Our Christmas CD?

by Leave a Comment

Before I get back to recording on the Ken and Lisa Theriot Christmas Album project (I know!  We need to hurry), I thought I’d send out a quick message telling what hardware and software I’m using.
Starting with the mics, I use a Shure SM-81 for acoustic guitar and either the Rode NT2-A or the Oktava MK319 for vocals.  These all feed into the EMU 1820m Audio Dock, which is my computer interface and has the mic preamps and analog-to-digital converters.  Then it’s all software.  I record into Reaper and do all my mixing and arranging (as well as track effects such as compression, EQ, Auto-Tune, reverb, etc).
Once all tracks are recorded, treated and mixed, I render it all to a 2-track stereo file.  I then open that file in Adobe Audition for final treatment, which includes stuff like trimming the front and back of the song to get rid of count-ins, and audible stuff at the end of the song.  I like to use quick fade ins at the beginning and fade outs at the end so everything starts and ends at absolute zero.
I then apply light compression to the song and normalize the volume so that the loudest bit of audio in the song is JUST below 0DB (the loudest digital volume level before distorting).
I do that for all the songs, making sure the average loudness (measured in Audition) is about the same (usually about -14 dB).  If a song is way below or above that, I’ll undo the compression-normalization steps and do each a little more or less until I get the average loudness to about -14DB.
Then I convert each song from 32 bits down to 16 bit audio, which is required for playing in a CD player.  I’m then ready to create a CD, burning directly from Adobe Audition.
Wow, that was a bit more than I had planned to say, but I couldn’t stop myself;).
We’ll have this thing out soon.  We promise!
Happy Holidays!
Ken

Home Recording Tips – Use Your Eyes AND Your Ears

by Leave a Comment

Home recording tips are so easy to implement these days due to the fabulous capabilities with have with computers.  In the old days of audio recording, when tape was the medium and pretty much everything was analog, you really had only your ears to rely on when recording and editing audio.  Even in the early days of digital recording this was the case.  Some may argue that was a good thing, and I can see (no pun intended) their point on one hand.  But modern pc audio recording allows us to get our eyes involved as well as our ears, and I just think that is awesome!
Nowadays, we can see the audio waves on a screen and it is now possible to glean a LOT more information about the audio than using just one sense.  This makes audio editing much faster.  For example, it is and always has been a common practice to comp (short for composite) multiple takes of a performance into a single track consisting of all the best bits.  If you had 3 or more takes to choose from, you really had to take a LOT of notes, as in writing stuff down with a paper and pencil.  I know, right?!  I used to have a million little post-it notes (and any other piece of paper that was handy) with start/stop times in minutes/seconds/milliseconds written down to identify a particular passage of audio.  Using a mouse to drag and drop passages from one take to another is now sooooo much faster.  Plus it’s greener, since I don’t have to waste so much paper;).
So for audio editing, I think using your eyes as well as your ears is one of the biggest advantages of modern pc audio recording.  But I do want to offer a bit of a warning.  It is possible to use your eyes too much, at the expense of your ears.  One example is in tuning a performance like, say, a vocal recording.  One of the other great things about recording nowadays is that there are cool tools like Auto-Tune, that allow you to correct pitch.  But boy-howdy has this been over-used!  Without going into specifics (which you can find in another of our posts about Auto-Tune), these tools allow you to see where the recorded pitch is on a grid representing the correct pitch.  It is very easy to simply drag the actual notes to the grid if they are a little off, even without listening!  This is a mistake.  You really need to listen BEFORE you correct, because humans are used to slight imperfections and variances in pitch.  A lot of times a sung note can sound perfectly fine even though the picture shows it to be a bit off the grid line.  If so, leave it alone.  If every single note is snapped to an exact note, it starts to sound unnatural.  It’s kinda like that line from the first The Matrix movie when the agent says “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.” You may even have noticed this in modern pop and country music.  And if you watch the TV show Glee, you hear Auto-Tune over-used every Tuesday night.  I still love the show though;).
Anyway, my advice on the use of audio editing tools on pc recording studios is to fight the urge to rely too much on the visual aspects of the tool.  Otherwise you could make too-perfect recordings that sound mechanical and, well, a bit like Matrix 1.0.
Ken
To get started recording on your own studio in the next hour (assuming you have a computer;), come on by Home Brew Audio for a visit and get some awesome audio recording tips and tutorials.

Are You a Gleek? Want To Get That "Glee" Sound?

by Leave a Comment

Glee Club PictureAre you a “gleek?”  (if you have been hiding for the past year, a “gleek” is someone who is a fan of the show Glee).  I confess that I definitely am.  I love music, recording, singing harmony, and ….well, OK, not high school.  What a horror show-except for the music!  Choir, musicals, my rock bands, singing Beach Boys and Asia harmonies at Carl’s Junior with my friends–THOSE were the things I loved about high school.  And that is what Glee is mostly about.  Plus there’s the hilarious Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester to keep the show from sliding into a pool of syrupy glurge.
But I digress.  Have you noticed anything odd about how all the singers sound on that show?  The cast members were selected because they could really sing (apart from looking the part and acting and all that too).  But when they produce the musical numbers, the voices sound a bit artificial don’t you think?  Every note is perfect–maybe too perfect.  It sounds kind of, well, computer-y to some folks.  Love it or hate it, this is down to the popularity of an audio processor called Auto-Tune, and its ilk.  And it pretty much defines what I am calling the “Glee sound.” and you can have it too, if you want to.
Antares Auto-Tune Vocal Studio Pitch Correcting Software is an awesome tool that can really help in the studio, though like anything else, it can definitely be over-used, and frequently is.  The program has two modes that can be used to treat a vocal track, the auto mode and the graphical mode.  In auto mode, all the singer’s notes are run through Auto-Tune’s processor and corrected automatically.  The entire track gets washed through a filter that snaps the vocal track’s pitch to a musical grid similar to the way a graphics program snaps shapes to a visual grid.  The auto mode is much faster to use.  You basically just flip a switch.  But when you wash an entire vocal track through the processor, you usually get a somewhat artificial and computer-y sounding product.
The graphical mode is like having the “snap-to-grid” option turned off in a graphics program.  It may take longer to get certain things lined up, but at least you can put everything exactly where you want it.  You can SEE the grid in graphical mode, but you choose which notes to correct and which ones to leave alone by dragging the pitch curve from the recorded voice closer to a grid line.  You also have several choices as to how intense the corrections you make should be.  Generally the smaller and less extreme the correction (just bumping an off-note a bit closer to the target pitch, say) the more natural it sounds.  This mode is much more hands-on and takes a bit longer.  But it can result in a much more natural sounding product.
If you would like to have that “Glee sound,” all you need to do is add the Auto-Tune plug-in to your pc recording studio software.  Don’t have your PC recording studio set up yet?  No problem.  You can do that in about 30 minutes by following the instructions in the free tutorials at Home Brew Audio, which you can access by clicking right here.
From one Gleek to another…happy recording!