Sep 05, 2018  Auto Key is a new helper plugin that comes with Auto-Tune Pro, and it serves two functions: First, it’s a key and scale detector that can be used on. Only when you crank the settings to the max (first done in Cher's Believe) is it quite obvious that auto tune is being used. There are lots of ways to provide live vocal distortion that are not auto tune. For instance, think about all the effects pedals a guitarist might use in a shoe gaze band.

• Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In Houston
• Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In California
• Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In Florida

• Print
• Font:
• +
• -

The following sentence might come as a huge shock to teens and Millennials, so stop tweeting for a second, kids, and get prepared for a totally outlandish statement. Here it is: Once upon a time, pop singers were actual singers.

1. 1. Autistic ballerina dances her way into hearts

      In a popular YouTube video, the beaming little ballerina dances an entire four-minute routine seemingly perfectly, matchin..

Yes, I know. That’s hard to comprehend since the pop charts are now dominated by artists who use Auto-Tune, the software plug-in that corrects the pitch of those who can’t really cut it in the vocal department and turns their vocals into robo-voices. While everyone under 30 recovers from that revelation, here’s what I mean by “actual singers.”

Back in the day, pop artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beatles used to be able to record albums in just a few days. Country musicians like Patsy Cline and George Jones trudged through grueling tours in out-of-the-way rural locales yet still missed nary a note. R&B musicians like the Supremes and the Four Tops navigated their way through complex choreography but still belted out songs out like their lives depended on it.

And while today, we still have singers with massively impressive pipes, a whole lotta them could never have rocked it for real like the Motown gang. These days, artists are able to get by on looks, publicity and aid from Auto-Tune.

You can hear the robotic, processed sound of the plug-in on recent hit records like “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga and “Right Now (Na Na Na)” by Akon. It’s also heard on tracks by Kanye West, Britney Spears and Lil Wayne. When West attempted to sing “Love Lockdown” without the plug-in on “Saturday Night Live,” the results were none too impressive and got ridiculed online. You can hear 10 examples of “Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music” on Hometracked, a blog geared toward home recording enthusiasts.

Paula Abdul also uses Auto-Tune on her new song, “Here for the Music,” which she performed (i.e. lip-synched) on “American Idol” May 6. It was evident just how artificial Abdul’s vocals were when she was followed by Gwen Stefani, who gave a warts-and-all live vocal on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.”

Country and rock singers are said to use Auto-Tune to protect themselves from hitting bum notes in concert. Pop singers use it when they have a hard time singing while executing complicated dance moves (raising the question as to why they’re letting their dancing take precedence over their music). Auto-Tune has become so ubiquitous that indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony to protest its overuse.

Building the ‘perfect’ beast
The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.

The first of these can lead to inspiring moments, as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones noted in an essay last year. Pioneering voice tweakers include producer Quincy Jones, who punched up Lesley Gore’s vocals with double tracking on “It’s My Party,” and George Martin, who gave us a childlike sped-up John Lennon on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Later on, Peter Frampton wowed audiences with his talk box guitar effect and a decade later, vocals were being put through harmonizers to get jarring outer space effects.

Of course, to pull off any of those effects, you had still had to be able to sing. With Auto-Tune you don’t.

Then there’s the quest for perfection. By the 1970s, producers were able to edit or splice together vocal takes from various tracks and eventually they started to use hardware that corrected vocal pitch to create “perfect” performances. When the sound editing program Pro Tools became the industry norm in the 1990s, kludged-together vocal tracks became the norm.

But too much meticulousness in pop music strips away passion. And the very reason we listen to music, noted the late rock critic Lester Bangs, is to hear “passion expressed.” Auto-Tune makes people sound like robots. And if there’s no feeling, why listen at all?

Some people apparently aren’t listening anymore. Sales of major label CDs are down. But more authentic sounding music still has fans. Paste magazine recently reported that indie music is selling more, and the one area of commercial music that’s remained popular is “American Idol,” where you can’t fake it (unless you’re Paula Abdul).

The producers speak
A lot of producers like to use Auto-Tune because it saves time, says producer Craig Street, who has worked with Norah Jones, k. d. lang and Cassandra Wilson. “If you have a smaller budget what you’re doing is trying to cram a lot of work into a small period of time,” Street says. “So you may not have as much time to do a vocal.”

Craig Anderton, a producer and music writer, observes that Auto-Tune “gets no respect because when it’s done correctly, you can’t hear that it’s working.

“If someone uses it tastefully just to correct a few notes here and there, you don’t even know that it’s been used so it doesn’t get any props for doing a good job,” Anderton notes. “But if someone misuses it, it’s very obvious — the sound quality of the voice changes and people say ‘Oh, it’s that Auto-Tune — it’s a terrible thing that’s contributing to the decline and fall of Western music as we know it.”

One producer who dislikes Auto-Tune is Jon Tiven, who cut his musical teeth in the punk rock era with his band the Yankees, and went on to produce soul singers Wilson Pickett and Don Covey as well as Pixies founder Frank Black. Tiven thinks Auto-Tune has led to the destruction of great singing.

“I don’t know how many levels you want to drop the bar for what it takes to become a successful musical person,” Tiven says. “You could sacrifice on some levels, but it would seem to me one of the first things you would really be hard pressed to sacrifice is if the person could sing in tune or not.”

Street says the like or dislike of Auto-Tune largely comes down to aesthetics, and likens people’s feelings about listening to unnatural sounds with the way some people feel about unnatural body modifications, such as breast implants.

And that makes sense. After all, today we have models and actors whose faces and bodies were never intended by nature, reality TV that’s not real, and sports “heroes” whose strength comes from pills not practice. It’s totally understandable that the commercial pop world would embrace an unnatural aesthetic. Whether audiences will someday want pop singers who are first and foremost singers remains to be seen.

© 2013 msnbc.com. Reprints

In today’s article, you’re going to see how to build and set up live auto tune for worship.

We’ll be covering:

• Uses and purpose of auto tune in worship

• Gear required for auto tune

• Setting up auto tuning

• Testing the signal flow

Before we jump in, don’t forget to check out and download our Worship Ministry Toolkit. This will provide you with a list of all the gear we talk about so it will help you follow along.

Uses and Purpose of Auto Tune in Worship

We know that auto-tune can be a divisive issue, but here are a couple things to keep in mind:

Auto-tune should never be used to compensate for poor singing

Auto-tune is not, and should not be used to ‘make up’ for wildly incorrect pitches, it is only there to give that extra push if necessary. We’re all for excellence in worship, and we encourage our band to practice and be the best that they can. Auto-tune is just a tech-savvy way of eliminating small mistakes or distractions.

Auto-tune works best with great singers

It can ‘tune’ them up to make dense, difficult harmonies that much better. Not everyone sings perfectly on pitch all the time and auto-tune is able to take those small inconsistencies and correct them in a natural, non-artificial sounding way. A part of gospel-centered worship is crafting the best ministry we can and we believe that auto-tune has a place in that vision.

Gear Required for Auto-Tune

I’m going to give you a brief overview of the gear you’ll need to set up auto-tune. I’ll go more in-depth in the next section, but the Ultimate Guide to Worship Tech 3-pt. Series will be helpful if you don’t already have some of this gear.

Digital Mixing Console

You’ll need a console that is comparable to the Midas X32 or M32. We use the M32R at our church, but you can use your preferred console so long as it can do the following:

• Can connect to computer via USB or Dante

• Has multiple inputs and outputs

• Can send raw audio data to the computer and then receive it back once it’s tuned

Pretty much any modern digital mixing console can do this, but just be aware so you don’t spend money on the wrong gear.
Dante Expansion Card

Now, this is not necessary, but it is extremely helpful for getting your auto-tune up and running. Dante helps you manage your inputs and outputs in a really straightforward way, making it easy for setup. You don’t need to use it, and can do just fine via regular USB connection, but we do think it makes managing your signal flow a lot easier.

Here’s a brief overview of our signal path:

• Signals from the three vocalists come from the sound console via Dante, to Ableton

• Signals get tuned and sent back to the sound console

• The sound console sends those signals and the tuned vocals come out of the PA

By utilizing the Dante network, all our gear can talk to each other and create the flow that you need. We put our auto tuning in Ableton, but on a computer that’s completely separate from our slides, clicks, tracks, etc. Because we have Dante, the computers can talk to each other and the mixing console so that they all work together and keep our signal paths uncluttered.

Auto Tune Plug-Ins

The two most popular tuning plug-ins are Auto-Tune and Waves Tune by Waves. We recommend Waves because it does everything Auto-Tune does but for a fraction of the price. Install the Waves Plug-In into Ableton and you’ll have vocal tuning up in no time.

Setting Up Auto Tuning

Now that we’ve gone through all of the gear, we’ll walk you through how to set up auto-tuning for one vocal mic.

Building in a Safety Net

This step isn’t necessary, but is a good practice just in case anything goes wrong. What we do is create two channels, one for the raw vocals and one for the tuned vocals. This is so if anything goes wrong with Ableton, the sound engineer can easily mute the tuned vocals and turn up the raw signal. Again, it’s not necessary but might be good to keep in mind when building your setup.

So here’s how we set up those channels:

• Raw signal from our stage box goes into our sound console (we also use this for the in-ear monitoring because it’s not good to monitor your tuned sound)

• The second, tuned signal is coming from the back of the board into Ableton where it’s tuned

• It’s then fed back into the console and goes out to the PA system

Routing Overview

Routing the signal to the stage box:

• Mic takes the sound and it goes to the XLR cable and into the stage box

  Traktor Pro 2 softwareA trustworthy platform for DJs, Traktor Pro 2 is the most advanced update of Traktor. With this update, the software has now reached Traktor Pro 2. Dj traktor pro 2 free download full version. You may also like.

• The stage box then goes to the back of the mixing console

Sending Audio to Ableton

• Since we’re using Dante, we send the signal from the mixing console through the Dante network

• The network picks up the signal and goes into the Dante Sound Card and into Ableton Live

• This gives you the ability to see and modify all of your channels with ease

Sending Signal Back to the Console

• You’ll be able to see the Dante Sound Card plug-in in Ableton

• It will give you access to all of the inputs/outputs, and you can modify which channels you want

• Once you’ve done that in the preferences, the signals will go back through the Dante Network and into the console

Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In Houston

Configuring Your Auto Tuning Preferences

Now that you’ve made sure all of your channels and routing are correct, you’re ready to dive into Waves.

• Go into the Ableton Plug-Ins tab and drag Waves down into the screen

• Once it’s open, hit the ‘wrench’ icon to open up your settings

• Now you can modify your pitch correction for your desired effects

Once your in the settings, you can play with everything from the tuning mode to the speed of the note transition. You can set them to anything you want, but we’ve found that the default settings already sound pretty natural. Any further tinkering is all to need or taste.

We’ve kept ours in the chromatic mode, which will correct the pitch to the closest chromatic note. We have competent singers so 99.99% of the time, the tuning corrects a slightly sharp or flat note to the desired pitch.

Testing the Signal Flow

Before you start using auto-tuning in your services, you’ll want to test it first.

Go back into Dante and make sure all of your channels, inputs, and outputs are correct. You should be able to see your inputs match up properly so that they’re all routed into the sound console. If you’ve done two channels like we do, you’ll be able to turn up or down each channel so you can hear the difference between the raw and tuned signal.

Wrap-up

The great thing about this setup is that you can customize it to exactly what you need. Auto-tune can empower even the best musicians sound even just a bit better, helping you to craft a gospel-centered and tech-savvy worship service.

To continue building a great worship ministry, feel free to connect with me and my team at Worship Tech School.

Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In California

Is Auto Tune Able To Be Used Live In Florida