In Summary

With many engineers relying on Antares’ Auto-Tune Pro X’s pitch rehab for vocals, fewer might be aware of its uses that reach beyond the top line. Here we show how Antares’ magic can also bend other sounds’ meanderings into shape…

Going Deeper

Music’s wide gamut of sounds can be grouped in a number of ways, and when it comes to tuned instruments, all are either polyphonic or monophonic. The latter group includes anything that (usually) only produces one note at a time, and alongside swathes of classical instruments such as brasses and woodwinds, one universal ‘monophone’ is the human voice. Despite advances in pitch correction tech, monophonic elements have perhaps until now lent themselves best to pitch-related fixes.

Getting It Wrong

Vocal imperfections are easy enough to understand, where the singer’s vocal cords vibrate too slow or fast for a given pitch. Other monophonic instruments can also suffer with imperfect intonation. For stringed instruments, pitchiness is related to string length, such as fingered stops on a violin, viola, cello, or double bass. Fretted instruments aren’t immune either, where the position of bridge saddles can make accurate open tunings sound progressively pitchier as the string is made shorter.

Antares Auto-Tune Pro X On Bass

Although Auto-Tune Pro X’s frequency-bending chops are well known for vocal massaging, fewer engineers will have turned it loose on another enemy of melody: pitchy bass. In the video we get to work using Auto-Tune Pro X to fix a high-register part that shows up the instrument’s intonation woes for the world to hear… Thanks to the tech that gets voices back on track, we use its Bass Instrument detection in a couple of moves.

Avoidance Techniques

Treatments such as Auto-Tune X have another life providing deliberately stylised textures, but their day job is still pulling any vocal back into shape to make a great take even better. That said, few would argue that singing or playing an accurate take is not the name of the game in any recording.

Promising pitch supremacy for any monophonic source, the perennial problems that can appear with some fretted instruments can also respond well to some rehab from Auto-Tune X. This can make it the take-saver to fix the track’s foundation as well.

Prevention is always better than cure, but sometimes using a magic bullet is the only option compared to going back in time armed with an Allen key and guitar tuner…

A Word About This Article

As the Experts team considered how we could better help the community we thought that some of you are time poor and don’t have the time to read a long article or a watch a long video. In 2023 we are going to be trying out articles that have the fast takeaway right at the start and then an opportunity to go deeper if you wish. Let us know if you like this idea in the comments.