4 Tips for the Final Mix Down

Music Post Production Tips

Author: Paul White Editor-In-Chief for Sound on Sound and Roland UK Features Team

1. Getting the Best Out of Autotune…

The pizza is all eaten, the tracks are all recorded, and everyone is satisfied that their parts are both in tune and in time. If not, it is usually quicker to record them again than trying to use editing to patch them up in post production. Having said that, slight imperfections in vocal pitching can be polished out using an automatic pitch correction program such as Autotune. Autotune, and its many imitators, has a correction speed slider that determines how quickly off-key notes are corrected. There’s usually also a little keyboard display where you can select the specific notes that are in the vocal part you’re working on if it strays outside one of the standard scales and keys that are on offer. The main problem I hear is that the correction speed has been set too fast and so the pitching sounds unnaturally rigid. We’re all familiar with the very obviously Autotuned sound used as an effect but once your ears know what to listen for, you start hearing it even when the settings are more subtle. The trick here is to use the slowest correction speed that still gets the job done as that will leave the natural slurs and inflections, that every singer produces, intact. More