Another autotune/pitch correction question.

[Advocate]

Hi everyone,

 

Total newbie to Logic here and to be honest, video and Final Cut are my preferred hobby, but I digress.

 

I work as a nurse in the UK and, as part of our annual Flu Vaccination campaign we now produce a light hearted video encouraging our staff to get their flu jab every year.  Part of this is that a song is picked, the lyrics re-written (generally cheesy) and the song is recorded for the "stars" of the video to mime to when it comes time for filming.  This part of the work is normally done by one of the guys who works in the Hospital Radio station but this year due to circumstances beyond our control, I have been asked to produce the song as well as the video.  I have very little time to do it in.

 

I went into work yesterday and recorded each member of staff singing the song as separate audio files, with the plan being that I could use Logics pitch correction tool to clean up the vocals.  I'm rapidly learning that pitch correction isn't a magical panacea!

 

On the whole the singing isn't too bad, but when I try to pitch correct it using the built in tool or Melodyne the results I'm getting aren't what I expected, with some notes being corrected to entirely the wrong notes.  Whilst trying to learn some more I read that these tools can only correct to within something like half a semitone so that's maybe why I'm getting the results that I am.

 

My question is (sorry it has taken so long to get to the point!) can I record the melody onto a separate track using one of the software synths and get either of the pitch correction tools to use that melody as a guide when correcting the vocals?  It sounds like that's something the tools should be able to do, but I can't for the life of me find any instructions on how to do it, my google-fu has let me down

 

If this is possible I'd really appreciate a mini guide on how to do it.

 

Many thanks,

 

Alistair

[Atlas007]

AFAIK, Logic Pro X's pitch correction facilities are decent for monophonic material. And Melodyne 4 is stellar, IMHO. 

 

If you have little knowledge/experience editing audio material either using Logic or Melodyne, time constraint is probably your worst ennemy here. By that I mean, you need to acquire some knowledge about audio concepts, then some knowledge and experience about using proficiently the available tools (such as Logic, Melodyne, etc...) to edit same.

Depending of the recorded performance, doing pitch correction is usually a tedious and lenghty task. Multiply that by the number of recorded performances to edit, and that would give you an idea of the work at hand, and the required time to accomplish it.

 

You mention that you don't obtain satisfactory results when pitch correcting vocal audio material beyond half semi tone. 

First thing that come to mind is that you probably get your vocal "chipmunk"ish sounding like or something similar. 

If that is the case, that kind of issue is usually caused by unduely pitch correcting the formants along with the rest of the vocal components. 

In both Logic and Melodyne, you could adjust/edit the naturally pitch vocal component discretely, without affecting the formant vocal component, hence yielding a more natural sounding transposed result.

 

Melodyne features a pitch correction macro function, which depends (optionally) of the selected scale/key (pitch grid). In order to obtain desired result, the setting of the scale/key is essential. A wrong setting here is probably why you get unexpected outcomes using that function.

 

To simplify your approach, recording each performers against the same music material, in order to use it as a pitch reference, should prove helpful. Also using the same recording device for each and all of the recordings will prevent other issues as well.

 

In Logic, the virtual instruments are MIDI based. With some basic musical theory knowledge (which notes pertain to a specific key/scale), with the help of  the Piano Roll editor's inspector Scale Quantize and Collapse Mode View features, you could easily define or edit your reference music scale. Once your scale is set/defined in there, you could use it as a visual reference to pitch-correct the other vocal audio tracks with Logic Flex Pitch; or, if using Melodyne, you could then set the corresponding scale (to the instantiated Melodyne's pitch correction macro) on the tracks, containing your recorded voices, and pitch-correct them accordingly.