 I am testing X42 Auto Hey! It's Anfa! I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer, but I only use open source software and Linux. Today I'm going to show you how to pitch correct vocal recordings using X42 AutoTune in Ardor. First I'm going to play you a result of my work with this so you can see what can be done and how does it sound. And then we're going to record something new and I'm going to show you the process that leads to the results that I got here. So here's the corrected version. I am testing X42 Auto And now I'm going to disable all the X42 AutoTune plugin instances and let's listen again. This is raw. I am testing X42 Auto If you haven't had any ear training, you might think they sound pretty much the same, but nope. So how was this done? You see X42 is a pretty simple but effective plugin. This is the user interface. I'm actually going to scale it so it's easier to see. Let's go higher than 200% it doesn't. So this is X42 AutoTune. I'm going to turn it on to... I'm going to turn on input. And now you can see that it's constantly listening to my voice and trying to identify the pitch that my voice produces. If I try to sing a note, it will tell me what note it is. In this instance that's an F and it will tell me if I'm sharp or flat. Now the thing is if you record a cappella stuff like what I did in this intro, it's not that easy to hear problems unless you have multiple voices then you can hear problems between them. But as soon as you're trying to tune your vocals to an accompaniment, some backing track or any instruments at all, you're going to immediately hear any intonation problems. And sometimes you don't have the skills or you don't have the time to re-record your stuff over and over. That's why being able to pitch correct your vocals is very useful. So I'm going to show you exactly how I made this. Each track... First I'm going to auto-tune and I'm going to play it to you. Maybe let's do it like that. I'm going to solo this and each vocal track it's an audio track obviously and it has a respective MIDI track. And that MIDI track is used to give X42 auto-tune context and tell it that the vocal should sing these notes, nothing else. So try to find the closest one among these and snap it to that. So you can immediately see what kind of problems we have. This is plus one semitone. So this is another note, this is half a semitone. And right now we have correction on. So this part would be sharp, but it's corrected. There's some uncertainty. And I'm using this MIDI note, you can see right here it's playing there. To make sure that we are playing this D sharp and nothing else because there was some uncertainty and it wasn't sure. So the note was jumping around. If I mute this MIDI region, you can hear there's this wobble. But because I provided this MIDI region and placed the D sharp note the plugin knows what note should be there. So it snaps it to there. And we can hear a little bit of a formant shift happening with the swobble. Our pitch is locked, but our formants are shifting. That's because X42 auto-tune unfortunately doesn't feature any formant correction. That means that unfortunately with big pitch differences you're going to hear a formant shifting happening around. Because it's pitch shifting which in turn shifts the formants and it doesn't correct for that. So the formants are going to be a little bit skewed which is less than ideal if you want natural sound. But this is the only plugin that does this kind of thing and it accepts external MIDI input. There's another plugin called Auto-Talent which does feature formant correction but it doesn't have an auxiliary MIDI input that can be used to determine what the pitch should be. So that plugin is not as controllable as this one. That's why I'm using X42 auto-tune. And of course this is not a problem if you're going for some weird effects but if you want to have very natural sounding vocals this is unfortunately not ideal. Let's listen further. So if I open the automation lanes for this maybe go show existing automation you can see that I'm automating the filter. Filter is this parameter here. Maybe I'll explain all the parameters now. So let's break down the UI of this plugin. On the left we have this keyboard widget which shows you the currently detected note on the keyboard. There's just one octave because it doesn't need more. And below it it's a tuning indicator which shows you how off the pitch the detected note is. So it's going to show you if the note is flat and it's going to go to the left. And zero is dead on. And to the left we have half of a semitone and then one whole semitone. That means if it goes up there that means it's already a different note. So it was here then it goes here. I'm going to explain all of these widgets in a second. So this shows us how in pitch we are. Now I love this plugin because of that measurement because it's very useful for recording not as a correction tool but as a monitoring tool. So when I sing I very often actually all the time I watch this plugin and when I listen and I see if I'm off pitch and if I'm singing the correct note I can verify. It helps me train my hearing and it helps me identify problems as they happen what I'm singing. So that when I sing something out of tune let me try some different run a lot. It's in pitch. If I'm singing this I know I'm flat so I should be going up. It's also a great game to just open this up and try singing so that you get dead on. It's very helpful if you can play an instrument for example just use a piano patch because this way you can train yourself to be able to sing in pitch and this is a very very helpful visual aid. So if you don't have great hearing this can help you train your ears so you will be able to perceive when you're flat when you're sharp and sing better. However if you didn't manage to sing better or perfectly you can use this tool to fix mistakes after you've recorded your vocal lines. Okay let's go further. So here is this piano widget. What we can do also here is disable some notes. So let's say in my melody there is only C E and A only D3 notes. You can see that now in my talking A that's an A A that must be C A and that must be E. So we can limit the selection of notes and if our melody has a known key you can just dial in this key you can also right click and here just choose a key. So if you right click on this keyboard widget you can select a C major key or a minor D minor or you can D sharp minor or D flat minor or we can select all and then it enables all the notes so it's a chromatic scale and not a particular one like G major or A minor which is equivalent to C major. And it disables all the black keys might not seem like that but that's what it does. Okay so this is the key selection. There's also a pitch bend widget that responds to midi pitch bend automation. To the right we have a midi panic button that means if the midi input gets stuck then this resets it. There's this mode. By default it's in auto. There's also midi where it only actually perform correction when you play a midi note. Or there's manual which means it will ignore midi input and only pitch correct based on the key you define here. And I think usually auto is the most easiest one to work with because you know that if you need you can specify a note and to snap it to there to remove this wobble effect but if you don't then it's going to try to do it automatically. Okay next thing is midi channel. It can of course listen to a specific midi channel. So for example I could actually have one midi track for all three voices and just use different midi channels and set auto tune plugins on each track with a different midi channel like one, two, three, whatever. Omni means it re-listens on all midi channels basically. So it's a bit easier to have it on separate midi tracks. I think. Next is fast mode. Fast mode is going to reduce the latency if you enable this. You can see that now the latency is 256 samples. If I disable that it's going to be 21.3 milliseconds. Of course the millisecond value is based on the sample rate. I'm working in 48kHz sampling rate so if you're working 44.1 that's going to be different. It's going to be a bit longer. Now there's tuning. Tuning of course is the base A note. So if you're singing in A44 tuning which is the standard that's the thing you want but you can also offset it between 400 and 480. So we have 40Hz up and down. If you right click you will reset it to default. Bias determines how much it's going to prioritize existing notes. So if you go and make this higher you can see that it snaps now when a bias is at zero it snaps to a different note when we reach half a semitone of detuning. It never goes beyond if I make this default 0.5 it goes about here so like probably 0.6 semitones and if you go all the way to 1 I can go almost right here. So bias will let you go more out of tune before it snaps to another note but the default 0.5 I think is pretty sane. Another one is filter and that's pretty important. Filter determines how fast it's going to track the pitch and basically this sets the amount of smoothing on the pitch correction while the current note does not change. If it does change the filter is bypassing the correction jumps immediately to new value. So this is pretty much like how much is it flattening each particular note's pitch. So if we make it faster we're going to squash our pitch more so probably it's going to be better at removing vibrato. If we go lower it might not catch the vibrato or slow pitch ramping between the notes until it snaps to a different note. So basically going to fast makes this sound robotic making go too slow make it miss like a pitch problem so it's not going to be as effective. And finally correction determines the amount of correction that is applied. One means it's going to tune your performance exactly to what it should be so it's going to snap it back to zero and then 0.5 means it's going to snap it only halfway there and zero of course means no correction so the plugin is then not going to perform any correction it's going to only show you what's going on. This is if I'm going to use this as a monitoring tool I'm going to turn down this to zero however because it introduces 20 milliseconds of latency when I'm going to sing and use this for monitoring I'm going to put it on a separate bus and record on a track that doesn't have this plugin on because then I can software monitor my vocal without having this additional 20 milliseconds of latency. Of course you can enable fast mode which will reduce that latency but that wasn't added until recently so yeah. There's also offset which you can use to introduce or reintroduce some pitch expression like pitch bends or vibrato if you automate it in a zigzag fashion so we can go two seven tones up or down or you can use this as a static pitch shift and basically that's it. So yeah, that's all user interface details you need to know let's now maybe record a vocal performance and then try and correct it using this plugin. I'm going to mute all these tracks or even just disable them and hide them. I'm going to make a new track and record some vocals. Okay, I'm also going to create a MIDI track I'm going to call this melody I'm going to call this voice and melody ahhh let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post let's listen to this ahhh what I'm going to do now is insert X42 autotune so let's go to plugin manager X42-autotune there's also a microtonal version I haven't used it because I'm not into microtonal music let's enlarge the user interface I'm going to enlarge the master track so we can have it on screen and have this all nice and large okay let's listen and monitor our performance I'm going to disable correction for now so it's not correcting anything ahhh let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post is it gonna sound awful awful awful ahhh there's a lot of vibrato and it's jumping all over the place let's enable correction now and see what happens ahhh let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post is it gonna sound awful awful awful ahhh yeah now if I turn the filter all the way up too fast let's hear what that will do ahhh let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post is it gonna sound awful awful awful ahhh yeah so that's the t-pain mode well I'm not going for this sound right now so let's try medium or medium rare now the thing is right now the plugin goes like all the way up it just levels out all the pitch all the time so what we can do is use automation to change the amount of correction at each point so that we can disable correction where we don't need it and enable it just where we need it ahhh let's see how bad it sounds usually I don't want to pitch correct the starts of the note because it sounds unnatural ahhh we are going sharp in this note so I need to add in some correction I'm going to ramp it up to a hundred percent and then ramp it back down again let's see ahhh let's see how bad it sounds ahhh let's see ahhh let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post we have a lot of vibrato in here and I think it's pretty centered we can see if we can flatten it out ahhh in post is it yeah it converts our vibrato into this weird formant wobble which is not necessarily a better thing in post however we could also automate the filter so that we can you know what let's change it to right mode so that it inserts a point determining this exact value here now we can change it to play mode and if we go all the way down it's fast and then it's going to be slower so I'm going to go for slow so enable this pitch correction make it strong but make it slow so it should pass through our vibrato it sounds much more natural post is it gonna sound up full we can maybe make it faster here full we're not correcting anything so let's enable the correction here sound up full that sounds bad let's make the filter slower sound up full and I think in this part we actually need to specify a MIDI note we're going to snap to let's do that so I have a MIDI track now x42 auto-tune by default comes with a sight chain input enabled and it's going to take a MIDI input so if I click in here I can select melody which is this track this MIDI track here and it will take the MIDI output of that track and feed it in here so now let's close this if I press a key it goes to the melody track and that MIDI data goes to the x42 auto-tune plugin now because of course we don't want to have this piano sound audible in the final track we can either mute this because the send this is the send that sends the MIDI data to x42 auto-tune this is prefader so it doesn't care we can mute the track and it's not going to produce sound but the MIDI data is going to still go through as you can see so we can unmute this track and insert a MIDI region if I mute this MIDI region you can hear that the pitch is jumping all around it's like trying to snap it to neighboring notes and that's no good and if we added just this little note here makes it sound better I'm going to mute this track so it doesn't interfere and we can just hear the vocal let's mute it this is very useful that you can define exactly what note or notes because if you play if you put multiple notes in here you can see we've defined A and also F sharp and then x42 auto-tune can decide which is closer and snap the note to that but we don't want F sharp we want just A sorry A and now this is all going to be the same note so let's try and do this and of course if we go all the way up with correction it's going to sound unnatural and weird it does snap the pitch though so if that's a problem that we're facing it can do this so maybe slicing this note into multiple ones is going to make it easier because we can play and stop full and we don't need to specify it let's mute the midi region and listen we have correction at zero so it's not doing anything that's why it sounded the same let's go with it like this now that's awful so we're going way overboard with this correction and it just doesn't work here so sometimes in transition between notes I would drop the correction to zero for a short while to let it like naturally transition and then we punch the correction back in it's still pretty weird I'm going to make the correction faster let's make it even faster there okay let's mute the auto-tune plugin and listen to the original oh yeah it's a wobbly oh yeah this is not wobbly in pitch it's wobbly in formance unfortunately this plugin doesn't correct formance I wish it would because it's very useful that it has this auxiliary midi input and it's very powerful it's really cool for some specific psychedelic vocal effects which I've demonstrated in a different video so I'm not going to do that here yeah, that's pretty much what I wanted to show you how to use x42 auto-tune, let's now add some reverb maybe this one ah let's see how bad it sounds when I'm not tuning it in post is it gonna sound awful awful awful ah yeah awful ah yeah so there you have it x42 auto-tune I hope this video was useful as you can hear the results are varied it's not it's definitely not a replacement for something like Melodyne but it can fix some problems and sometimes when you don't have time to re-record another vocal take or 5 or the 20 I've used it with success and I've been able to complete projects that I wouldn't be able to complete otherwise without having to cringe every time I listen to them and yeah thanks for watching I hope this video was worth your time also huge thanks to all the people who are supporting me financially if you the reviewer would like to join them please go to patreon.com or liberape.com where you can give me a buck or two every month and also you can join my community chat on Rocket Chat or Discord the links are in the video description you can also download the project file that I've made here and you can experiment with it I'll see you in the next one let's see how bad it sounds while I'm not tuning in and post I bet it's gonna sound awful awful oh yeah if we make it faster it's going to squash our pitch to each note