WAVES DOES REALTIME AUTOTUNE
10 August 2016
I know what you’re thinking… big deal, T-Pain already has an app for that. So does Antares; Autotune Live lets you do natural pitch correction or get that Autotune effect in realtime. There’s not really a whole lot of difference between it and the main functions of Waves’ new Tune Real-Time plug-ins. They can both use MIDI to control parameters, play with the speed of tracking, target notes to scales, allow vibrato to slide through or tailor it to suit, select the singer’s range, detune the entire scale, and adjust the formant and pitch tightness. Where Waves focus diverges is more to do with the act of using the plug-in in real time in a modern workflow. It left of vibrato creation and humanising parameters, but added a couple of its own features to make the parameters a little easier to handle in the thick of a performance. Firstly, a link control between the speed and note transition dials is handy, as is the ability to tell ‘off’ notes where to go with the keyboard GUI. Rather than letting the algorithm split non-scale notes down the middle and send everything above 50% off sharp and the rest below, you can tell an entire off note to shift down or up. It’s that kind of tailoring that will let live music directors onboard this in production and really lock down a vocal night after night. The other main difference is Waves’ GUI; it’s touch-capable. For live engineers bringing up plug-ins, or using Waves’ own live software, every parameter will easily cop a finger prod, even the resize-able keyboard.
What seems missing is a link between this real time version and Waves’ other tuning products. While you can obviously split a vocal and record the original take as a ‘backup’ while live tuning on an aux. It would seem handy to then be able to save that tuning data, open up Waves Tune and finesse the original tune if the tracking wasn’t appropriate for a section. A potential miss there.
Either way, it looks like a potentially handy plug-in if you’re using scads of auto-tune anyway, or need to rip through tracking fast to meet a deadline or time constraint.
It’s available for a launch price of US$99.
More Info:
www.waves.com/plugins/waves-tune-real-time
Australian Distributor: www.sound-music.com
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