Auto‑Tune first started out as a TDM plug‑in (reviewed in SOS August '97), but subsequently appeared in 1U rackmounting hardware form as the ATR1 (reviewed in SOS October '98). It is now also available in a version for the DAL V8 system, and at a significantly lower price in the DirectX version reviewed here.
All Auto‑Tune products have the same goal — to correct the intonation of vocals and other monophonic instruments (chords don't work), without stripping the human element from the performance. In the Automatic mode you select the key and scale being used in the song, and then any note that deviates from the correct pitch will be automatically shifted to the correct one. The change in pitch is displayed in a vertical bar‑graph display from +100 to ‑100 cents (±1 semitone).
There is a huge number of scales from which to choose. Modern options include major, minor and equal‑tempered chromatic. There are a dozen historical options such as the Ling Lun and Pythagorean 12‑tone scales, an Indian 22‑tone scale and a five‑tone Indonesian scale in the Ethnic section, plus nine contemporary tunings with a larger number of tones, such as quarter‑tone and 53‑tone. The Edit Scale option allows you to remove specific notes from an existing scale if they don't exist in the song, or ignore them when tracking pitch (to cope with a singer's intentional pitch‑bends, for instance).
A Retune slider lets you adjust how quickly the pitch gets shifted towards the correct note. 'Instant' pitch‑shift creates the famous robotic Cher effect. At slower settings pitch correction tends to sound more natural, since it preserves small nuances of expression, rather than completely flattening them out.
At its simplest, all you need to do is select the appropriate scale and Retune speed and every note will be carefully pulled back to the desired values, but of course there is a host of other options to optimise results for different material. If your song doesn't exactly conform to concert pitch (based on A at 440Hz) then you can use the Scale Detune slider to compensate. I would have found a test‑tone facility useful here to help find the correct value for recorded material. Measuring the instantaneous pitch of any signal relies on finding a number of instantly recognisable cycles, and the Auto‑Tune algorithm can be fooled by breaths and other non‑periodic information — the Tracking slider lets you relax its tracking if you get sudden pitch jumps due to mis‑tracking.
For more advanced work you can switch to the Graphical Mode (see screenshot), which creates a graph of pitch against time. Click on the Track Pitch button and then play the section to be treated — at the end of playback it switches to 'Correct Pitch' mode and displays the graph. You can then use various graphic objects to 'draw in' the desired pitch on the graph. This lets you edit down to individual syllables of a word, if required, and if you only have a couple of 'bad' notes in a take then this approach may be more successful. You can draw in any multi‑segment line using the Line Tool (useful for drawing in horizontal 'notes') or you can use the Curve Tool to manipulate larger sections of pitch‑change information in a more general way, retaining any short‑term changes already programmed.
I was impressed with Auto‑Tune's pitch shifting, which seems to contain none of the lumpy or burbly artefacts exhibited by so many other products. A test‑tone facility would have been useful to help setting up the Scale Detune slider, and you do need some practice before getting reasonable results from all the controls, but the results are worth it. I didn't like the floppy disk install procedure which didn't initially recognise its own Key Disk, but at least this was sorted out with an updated driver file.
At £269, Antares Auto‑Tune won't be a casual purchase for most musicians, but for those PC owners who run commercial studios it could be a godsend when rescuing otherwise unusable vocal takes. For Mac users, an even cheaper option is the new Auto‑Tune VST LE (Lite Edition) at £89, which provides exactly the same Automatic features, but no Graphical ones. Sadly there is no word of a Lite PC version at the moment. Martin Walker