Autotune 7 (Antares)Autotune is based on submarine
technology they had created to communicate between vessels using
tones. It worked by sending out a tone that is received as a completely different tone at the other end. In reality it's slightly more
complex than this, but when the genius who invented this
concept applied this theory to an
audio signal, the idea would be to change the note a person is
singing, to either a
more solid note or a diferent one altogether. Thus the
birth of Autotune. It wasn't until
multi-platinum selling recording artist T-Pain
discovered a way of using Autotune to create a sort of
vocoder type effect, which subsequently
launched his career and became Autotune's main
selling point. He was later followed by a host of other
artists including,
Lil Wayne, Young Thug, Future, Drake and many others who similarly rose to fame off the back of the Autotune sound; all using it in a very similar way, with
slight variations in configuration. However,
Autotune was never originally intended as a robotic
singing effect, it was created to tune
vocals and to a certain extent has the
ability to do so. It allows the user to set a key to fit the
projects instrumentation and any audio on the
channel with Autotune on will be retuned in
tones that fit the user defined key. So in theory when a
singer goes out of key Autotune will shift the
vocal back on note. It also enables a
producer to effectively
tune a vocal to fit instrumentation that is in a completely diferent key to the recorded
vocal (as do Melodyne and
Flexi Pitch but in different ways). It's a great
plugin and has many uses but ive found that when using it to actually
tune up vocals it heavily removes the
natural sound of the singers voice. In conclusion, "Autotune" is a great
standalone application and plugin for, tuning instrument
audio tracks, creating vocals with the robotic vocoder
sound and for remix producers wanting to change the key in which a vocal was recorded. However, it falls extremely short of the mark in terms of actually making you sound like a flawless singer (although the latest version has improved greatly and has a built in Melodyne feature which could possibly give Autotune 7 the edge out of the two).