Autotune Effekt Programmes
How to include The T-Pain Effect autotune into programs Description Enrich the toolsets of such programs as GarageBand, Logic, Pro Tools, SONAR and others by adding the function for detailed pitch shifting and adjustment. Auto-Tune is used daily by thousands of audio professionals around the world. Whether to save studio and editing time, ease the frustration of endless retakes, save that otherwise once-in-a-lifetime performance, or create the Auto-Tune Vocal Effect, Auto-Tune is the overwhelming tool of choice.
W here the future is still what it used to be – Antares Audio Technology marketing sloganLong before inventing Auto-Tune, the mathematician Dr. Andy Hildebrand made his first fortune helping the oil giant Exxon find drilling sites. Using fabulously complex algorithms to interpret the data generated by sonar, his company located likely deposits of fuel deep underground. New home 656a manual muscle cars. Alongside math, though, Hildebrand’s other passion was music; he’s an accomplished flute player who funded his college tuition by teaching the instrument. In 1989, he left behind the lucrative field of “reflection seismology” to launch Antares Audio Technology, despite not being entirely certain what exactly the company would be researching and developing.The seed of the technology that would make Hildebrand famous came during a lunch with colleagues in the field: When he asked the assembled company what needed to be invented, someone jokingly suggested a machine that would enable her to sing in tune. The idea lodged in his brain.
Hildebrand realized that the same math that he’d used to map the geological subsurface could be applied to pitch-correction.The expressed goal of Antares at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly—seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.And that is exactly how Auto-Tune has worked in the preponderance of its usage: Some speculate that it features in 99 percent of today’s pop music. Available as stand-alone hardware but more commonly used as a plug-in for digital audio workstations, Auto-Tune turned out—like so many new pieces of music technology—to have unexpected capacities.
In addition to selecting the key of the performance, the user must also set the “retune” speed, which governs the slowness or fastness with which a note identified as off-key gets pushed towards the correct pitch. Singers slide between notes, so for a natural feel—what Antares assumed producers would always be seeking—there needed to be a gradual (we’re talking milliseconds here) transition. As Hildebrand recalled in one interview, “When a song is slower, like a ballad, the notes are long, and the pitch needs to shift slowly. For faster songs, the notes are short, the pitch needs to be changed quickly. I built in a dial where you could adjust the speed from 1 (fastest) to 10 (slowest). Just for kicks, I put a ‘zero’ setting, which changed the pitch the exact moment it received the signal.”It was the fastest settings—and that instant-switch “zero”—that gave birth to the effect first heard on “Believe” and which has subsequently flourished in myriad varieties of brittle, glittering distortion.
Technically known as “pitch quantization”—a relative of rhythmic quantization, which can regularize grooves or, conversely, make them more swinging—the “classic” Auto-Tune effect smooths out the minuscule variations in pitch that occur in singing. At the speediest retune settings, the gradual transitions between notes that a flesh-and-blood vocalist makes are eliminated. Instead, each and every note is pegged to an exact pitch, fluctuations are stripped out, and Auto-Tune forces instant jumps between notes.
The result is that sound we know so well: an intimate stranger hailing from the uncanny valley between organic and synthetic, human and superhuman. A voice born of the body but becoming pure information.Over the ensuing years, Antares have refined and expanded what Auto-Tune can do, while also creating a range of related voice-processing plug-ins. Most of the new features have been in line with the original intent: repairing flawed vocals in a way that sounds naturalistic and is relatively inconspicuous on recordings. Hence functions like “Humanize,” which preserves the “small variations in pitch” in a sustained note, and “Flex-Tune,” which retains an element of human error. Some of Auto-Tune’s sister products add “warmth” to vocals, increase “presence,” intensify breathiness. The freaky-sounding Throat EVO maps the vocal tract as a physical structure, just like Hildebrand mapping the oil fields miles underground. This phantasmal throat can be elongated or otherwise modified (you can adjust the position and width of vocal cords, mouth, and lips too), allowing the user to “literally design your own new vocal sound,” according to the Antares website.But as the more overtly artificial uses of Auto-Tune became a craze that never ran out of steam, Antares soon stepped in with anti-naturalistic software like Mutator EVO.
Described as an “extreme voice designer,” Mutator enables the user to sculpt a voice and either “mangle” it “into a variety of strange creatures” or “alienize” it, shredding the vocal into tiny slivers, stretching or compressing the length of those snippets, playing them in reverse, and so forth—ultimately creating your own unique version of an alien language.All of this is Antares supplying a demand that it had never originally imagined would exist. The real impetus came, as always, from below: performers, producers, engineers, and beyond them, the marketplace of popular desire. If the general populace had uniformly recoiled from the Cher effect, or from its recurrence half-decade later as the T-Pain effect, if Lil Wayne and Kanye West had reacted like Jay-Z and spurned the effect rather than embraced it as a creative tool, it’s unlikely that Antares would be catering to the appetite for vocal distortion and estrangement. The crucial shift with Auto-Tune came when artists started to use it as a real-time process, rather than as a fix-it-it-in-the-mix application after the event. Singing or rapping in the booth, listening to their own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones, they learned how to push the effect. Some engineers will record the vocal so that there is a “raw” version to be fixed up later, but—increasingly in rap—there is no uncooked original to work from. The true voice, the definitive performance, is Auto-Tuned right from the start.Rap of the 2010s is where that process has played out most glaringly and compellingly: MCs like Future, Chief Keef, and Quavo are almost literally cyborgs, inseparable from the vocal prosthetics that serve as their bionic superpowers.
But we can also hear the long-term influence of Auto-Tune on singing styles on Top 40 radio. Vocalists have learned to bend with the effect, exploiting the supersmooth sheen it lends to long sustained notes, and intuitively singing slightly flat because that triggers over-correction in Auto-Tune pleasingly. In a feedback loop, there are even examples of singers, like YouTube mini-sensation, who’ve learned to imitate Auto-Tune and generate the “artifacts” that the plug-in produces when used in deliberately unsubtle ways entirely naturally from their own vocal tracts.is the dominant singer of our era, in no small part because the Barbados grain of her voice interacts well with Auto-Tune’s nasal tinge, making for a sort of fire-and-ice combination. Voice effects have been prominent in many of her biggest hits, from the “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh” pitch descents in “” to the melodious twinkle-chime of the chorus in “.” Then there’s, whose voice is so lacking in textural width that Auto-Tune turns it into a stiletto of stridency that—on songs like “” and “”—seems to pierce deep into the listener’s ear canal.
In “Death of Auto-Tune,” Jay-Z boasted, “My raps don’t have melodies” and claimed that his music made people “wan’ go commit felonies,” even comparing the track to “assault with a deadly weapon.” In other words, unlike all that pop-friendly rap with R&B choruses, this was the raw shit—uncompromising and street-real.A decade on, in an ironic turnabout, it is hip-hop at its most melodious and “cooked” sounding that is the most hardcore in its themes. Trap is hard to define as a genre—even the trademark rapid-fire hi-hats are not always present in every track—but one widespread characteristic is the way that performers dissolve the boundary between rapping and singing.
And that development owes a huge amount to Auto-Tune. To borrow a phrase from T-Pain, Auto-Tune turns rappers into singers—or something unclassifiably in-between. Accentuating the musicality already present in rhythmically cadenced speech, pitch-correction technology pushes rapping towards crooning, encouraging rappers to emit trills and melodic flourishes that would otherwise be outside their reach. Auto-Tune works as a kind of safety net for vocal acrobatics—or perhaps the equivalent of the harness and pulley-ropes that enable stage performers to fly.“We’re getting melodies that wouldn’t exist without it,” says Chris “TEK” O’Ryan. Listening to the Auto-Tuned and otherwise effected versions of themselves on headphones as they record in the studio, rappers like Quavo and Future have learned both how to push specific extreme effects and to work within this melodic rap interzone, exploiting the glistening sinuosity inherent to Auto-Tune.
As Future's engineer and vocals specialist, the late Seth Firkins, once put it, “Because Auto-Tune pegs him to the right pitches, he can try any shit, and it’ll still sound cool.”One legitimate complaint about Auto-Tune could be that it has stripped the blues element out of popular music—all those slightly off-pitch but expressive elements in singing—in favor of a remorseless flawlessness (which is why so much pop and rock today feels closer to the musical theater tradition than to rock’n’roll). But goes the opposite direction.
He’s reinvented blues for the 21 century, restoring it not just as a texture (raspy, rough-toned) or as a style of delivery (somewhere between speech and singing) but as a mode of feeling, an existential stance towards the world.“My music—that’s pain,” Future has said. “I come from pain, so you gonna hear it in my music.” He’s talking here about his past, a childhood of poverty in the thick of the drug trade. But it equally describes his present, as captured in the disjointed stream of consciousness of his lyrics, which depict a treadmill grind of emotionless sex and numbing drugs, a lifestyle of triumphs and material splendor that feels strangely desolate. Take the extraordinary “,” off 2016’s, on which Future rap-sings, “I got money, fame, I got mini-mes/I can feel the pain of my enemies/I been downin’ Percosets with Hennessy/I can hear the hood sayin’ they proud of me.” It’s not entirely clear if he’s gloating about the jealousy of haters, as is the rap norm, or if he’s so sensitized and tuned-in to external emotional vibrations that he really does feel the pain of those he’s defeated. The “pride” that pops up repeatedly and dissonantly in the song’s lyric (see also “gave her two Xans now she proud of me”) speaks of an inside-out world where socially destructive and personally dissolute acts become glorious and heroic. But then, that’s just like rock’n’roll isn’t it—at least in the Stones/Led Zeppelin/Guns N’ Roses sense.Wielding Auto-Tune like this century’s equivalent of the electric guitar, Future has explicitly differentiated his way of working from T-Pain’s, saying that, “I used it to rap because it makes my voice sound grittier.” According to his late engineer Firkins, the Auto-Tune was always on, from the start of any Future session, because “that’s how we get the emotion out of him.” The performer and the technical interface merge into a synergy system, a feedback circuit.
Auto Tune Live
Over the course of his vast discography of mixtapes and studio albums, Future has learned how to work the technology, conjuring the cold-inside shivers that run through the marrow of the hook in “,” the chirruping gasps of self-rapture in “,” the ecstasy of triumph, abandon, and carelessness in “,” and the groggy whimper of “,” where his voice seems to fizz like the syrup mixing with the Sprite. Four of the most potent sonic statements of this current decade, these songs couldn’t have existed without Hildebrand’s invention. With Future, a technology designed to glaze over deficient performances with posthuman precision has become a rehumanizing noise-generator, a distortion device to better reflect the aching mess of dirty souls.Paradoxically, Auto-Tune’s most flagrantly artificial effects have come to signify authenticity at its most raw and exposed. “I was going to lie to you but I had to tell the truth,” as Future put it on “.” Oddly, yet logically, Auto-Tune parallels the effects of the prescription meds that Future abuses so prodigiously. Just as the painkillers and anxiety-deadeners seem to simultaneously numb him and unloose him emotionally, Auto-Tune works in Future’s music as a mask-on/mask-off device—at once shielding and revealing. Through the “lie” of its distancing mechanism, Future can tell the truth.As Future’s own drug-soaked output testifies, Auto-Tune isn’t just the fad that won’t fade, it’s become the sound of being faded. Auto-Tune and other forms of vocal effecting are the primary color in the audio palette of a new psychedelia.
Appropriately for these dispiriting and despiritualized times, it’s a hollowed-out and decadent update, oriented around razing rather than raising consciousness. Trap and its local subsets like Chicago drill represent a kind of debased transcendence: struggle and sleaze gilded through the prismatic perceptions generated by a polydrug diet of prescription downers, codeine-laced cough syrup, weed, MDMA, and alcohol.Which is one reason why comes over on his recordings like some strange composite of mystic and monster, saint and savage: He sounds serenely detached even as he’s rapping about putting silencers on guns and thotties riding him like a Harley. Keef’s goblin glint of a voice drones deadpan from amid beats whose synth-orchestrations and tinkling bell-sounds resemble Christmas trees draped in fairy lights. On tracks like “” and “” off 2015’s astonishing mixtape, delay effects multiply Keef into rippling after-images, like selves receding in a mirrored hotel elevator.There’s a similar glassy iridescence to songs like “” and “.” From Rodeo and to, Scott’s albums could easily be filed under “ambient” as much as rap. If there’s a through line to his work, it’s voice processing: not just Auto-Tune but delays, stereo-sculpted chorusing and harmony structures, phasing, and God knows what else. The result is a panoply of ear-tantalizing tingles: the ghostly flutter of “” and “,” the gaseous moans and sighs of “” and “,” the Escher-like vocal architectures of “” and “” If anything, this year’s Astroworld sounds more like a showcase for production ideas than an integrated collection of emotionally coherent song-statements.Early in his career Travis Scott worked with Alex Tumay, better known as ’s sound engineer.
Antares Autotune Pro
Even without the involvement of technology, Thug would be the maven of voice mutation. His vocal equipment—throat, palate, tongue, lips, and nasal cavities—amounts to a formidable machinery for the mangling of sound and sense. His mouth is a bubbling font of babble, a zoo-music menagerie of uncaged moans, gibbering whoops, creaky croaks, throttled vowels, and gnashing noises, like an Amazonian shaman tripped out on DMT.So Thug doesn’t really need any help distorting and distending his voice, but he gets it nonetheless from Tumay and his bag of technological tricks. Auto-Tune and other vocal treatments serve for Thug a role similar to the wah-wah effects that applied to his trumpet during his wild ’70s phase of fevered fusion. And Tumay is equivalent to Miles’ producer Teo Macero: the white co-pilot to the black explorer, creating the optimal conditions for the visionary’s creativity to flare with utmost out-there-ness. Where Macero excelled at post-production, piecing together snippets of Miles and his band’s jams into the tapestries released as albums like and, Tumay’s role with Thug is a rapid-response real-time affair.
Reacting on the fly, the engineer throws in delays, Harmony Engine doublings, and other plug-ins so that the rapper hears and responds to them live in the booth; Thug apparently hates it if effects are added after the event, invariably rejecting these additions and alterations.As with Firkins and Future, the Thug/Tumay collaboration is a symbiosis. Listening to tracks from 2015’s like “” and “,” you can’t really distinguish the rapper’s mouth music virtuosity from the engineer’s treatments. The man-machine merger peaks with the chopped-and-screwed “,” where Thug’s molten wheezes resemble strings of fluorescent ectoplasm being drawn out of his mouth. As a crush-collision of vocal eccentricity and woozy beauty, the track is rivaled only by “” off, Thug’s “singing album.” Here, Thug invents a machine-boosted hyper-falsetto, a frail wavering warble that sound like he’s coming with every note. Folding ecstasy upon ecstasy into the word “infinity,” Thug reaches piping peaks comparable to Al Green at his most sex-mystical.Where Thug is on a solo trip to the stars, get there collectively. On and the, trap goes choral.
Tracks like “,” “,” and “” work as honeycomb lattices of voices keyed to mesh with doo-wop-like perfection, while also being differentiated texturally by contrasting degrees of Auto-Tune—a range from almost naturalistic rapping auto-tweaked for a subtle melodious sheen (Takeoff) right the way across to otherworldly abstraction (Quavo). In these terraced voicescapes, the focal rapper on each verse is shadowed by antiphonal layers.
At the first level, there’s the continuous stream of ad libs echoing or commenting on the lyric, or syncopating against the groove as non-verbal grunts, whoops and voice-percussion effects that also serve as Migos audio-logos, like the tires-skidding “ skrt-skrt-skrt.” One layer behind the ad libs, there are gurgling ripples of wordless vocal, Auto-Tuned for zero-speed pitch-correction. Described by rap pundit Sadmanbarty as “murmurs from a Martian crypt,” this Migos trademark has a Medieval flavor, a holy rolling drone faintly redolent of the chanting of Benedictine monks. Where the lyrics conjure a profane cartoon of bitches, brutality, and boasting, these blissed-out backing vocals create an effect like stained glass, transfiguring lowlife into highlife. Alongside its unexpected musicality, it’s the sheer splendor of the Migos sound that is shocking—the way songs like “” really do seem to drip and splash with glistening rivulets of light. The story of Auto-Tune and its commercial rivals in pitch-correction and vocal design is part of a wider phenomenon: the emergence of the voice as the prime area for artistic adventure and innovation in the 21st century.