How to Use Pitch Correction for Vocal Effects

Nov 4th in Logic Pro, Production by Ryan Leach

Auto-tuned vocals are a cool effect have become a standard technique in popular music. The sound can be heard all over pop and electronica from the last decade. A variety of artists use it, from T-Pain to Cher, and even the J-Pop band Perfume from West's Polyrhythm tutorial . Even President Obama has gotten in on it (well, sort of...).

Author: Ryan Leach

Ryan Leach is an LA based composer, arranger and producer. His music has been heard on NBC, ABC, CBS and MTV, and other credits include additional music for Jerry Bruckheimer's hit series "Cold Case", technical assistance on "The Simpsons Movie", "Bee Movie", and "The Dark Knight", and original compositions for Disney Interactive. He is also co-owner and producer of Short Order Strings.

What you might not realize though is that it's a surprisingly easy effect to achieve. All you need is a source track and an Auto-tune plug in (or an Auto-tune clone, in this case we'll use Logic Studio's built in Pitch Correction).

First I'll explain the parts of Pitch Correction that we're going to use. Next I'll walk through two different examples of how to put the effect to use. In this tutorial I'll use the term Pitch Correction to mean the same thing as Auto-tune.

Pitch Correction

Pitch correction is mainly described as a way to "correct intonation". If a singer is a little off pitch it can correct this error and make the performance sound better. But the effect can warp the sound of the audio, so for it to go unnoticed it needs to be applied subtly. Eventually someone figured out that the warped sound can actually be pretty cool, and by applying pitch correction heavily you can get some interesting effects. At last, gone are the days when you actually have to be able to sing to be a singer!

When you first instantiate Pitch Correction on an audio track you see the following window:

The only parameters we're going to work with in this tutorial are Response and the individual pitch keyboard. What we're essentially going to do is choose which pitches are allowed to pass through (using the keyboard) and then decide how much of the effect to apply (using the Response parameter). The Range on the left side we'll generally leave on "normal", unless you happen to be working with a particularly low pitched source.

The keyboard allows you to choose which pitches the source sound will be tuned to. If you have every note selected (which is the default setting), then the plugin will determine which pitch the incoming signal is closest to and adjust to it accordingly. Sometimes if you're original signal is especially "pitchy", the plugin can misinterpret the intended pitch. (For example if you sing a C but it is so flat the plugin thinks you meant B, it will "correct" the pitch to B).

Therefore it's generally a good idea to only allow the pitches you want to be heard. If you're original signal only uses Cs, Ds and Gs, then only highlight those three pitches.

The Root and Scale settings allow you to set an entire group of notes with just a few clicks, rather than have to go through and individually select every note that we want to pass through. In this case "Root" is the key you're working in, so in C major your root is C. Scale is obviously the scale. In almost all cases you'll want Major Scale or Natural Min Scale, but you have plenty of options available. It can be fun to click through the different choices to see what kind of result you get.

The Response parameter allows us to determine just how much of the effect we want applied. This is determined in milliseconds. The less obvious you want the effect to be, the longer it should take for it to apply which means a higher response setting. For our purposes, since we're going for a very affected sound, we're going to set the Response time all the way to 0ms. That way the pitch correction will be applied immediately, giving us the robotic effect we're looking for.

For Effect

Now that we've seen the basic parameters let's see how they can be applied. For our first example I want to create a downtempo electronica track. I want to use a pitch corrected vocal not as a lead singer, but more like just another sound in the overall texture of the groove. I've chosen the following samples from the Deep India library as my base vocal sounds: