Waveform Wednesday: Auto Tune Techniques in Digital Performer

Everybody loves auto tune! Whether you’re going for the over the top T-pain style autotune or just a subtle fix to an otherwise good take, autotune can be a useful tool or effect. Logic and Digital Performer both have autotune functions that ship with the software and both can be used to get effect. The main difference being that in DP the autotuning happens on the actual track, as well as having control of how you’d like to tune each individual note.

Once you have a track you’d like to tune double click on the audio to open the sequence editor then switch the editing view to pitch.

Once there make sure to zoom in so you can see the individual notes to edit.
Now that you’re in pitch edit mode, there are a couple different things you can do.
First is you can auto correct all the pitches by going to the audio menu and select “pitch correction”, there are a couple different options, the quickest and easiest being “quantize pitch”, which will drag any notes that are off onto the next closest pitch.

You can also adjust how much you want DP to cut up each individual note, so you have more or less options of individual segments to edit.
Another thing to make sure you do is set the pitch mode, so DP knows how to properly use pitch correction on the audio, select either instrument or vocal. This is also under the audio in “pitch correction”.

The second way to use pitch-correction in DP is manually. To do this, zoom into the track so you can see each note and simply drag each one to the desired pitch. Another function you can do manually is adjust the level of vibrato on each note, to do this hold down options and click the note you’d like to edit and then drag up to increase the vibrato or drag down to flatten it (T-pain style).

-by LC Tech Blog contributor Marcus Bagala