Report of the technical meeting on 9th September 2006by Mr. Vijay Dayal on ‘Understanding Antares Autotune’

 Mr. Vijay Dayal, a leading song recordist in Bollywood, presently works with YRF Studios, a smacking new hi –tech facility for film song recording.
Mr. Dayal first discussed in length the need for the pitch correction phenomenon. Earlier when songs used to get recorded ‘all at once’. So pitch decisions were simple and intuitive. In the production environment of today, the decision of pitch matching has become all the more difficult. Different elements get recorded at different ‘places’, at varying points of time and with different arrangers. This essentially amounts to having pitch anomalies in different elements of a song. This in turn culminates in recording, say vocal, at slightly off pitch. The best and time saving solution is to use pitch correction at or just before the mix. Moreover there are some talents who can’t perform without pitch correction. And some vouch for Antares Autotune.

He also listed the pitch correction softwares .He then settled on the way he uses the Antares Autotune. For this he had his laptop loaded with pro-tools with Antares Autotune 4 in place. He said that working knowledge of music is essential and adequate knowledge is desirable to successfully understand and exploit this software.

He started of with the explanation of each control on the ‘front panel’ of the software. 

He punctuated his demonstration with actual pitch correction applications on few samples.

He then explained how to create, say, a three part harmony of the main melodic line.

At the end of the presentation there was a lively question/answer session. Members wanted to have more demonstrations. But Mr. Dayal declared his inability in getting more samples as almost all his work is copyrighted/unpublished kind.
At the end he stressed that autotune is not the replacement for having to render a rightly pitched vocal to start with. This will leave the artist satisfied and of course recording engineer as well, for he has not to degrade the quality of vocals by adding an extra processing stage of pitch correction.