Pitch Correction Shenanigans

Since I've specialised in sound design more so than music, I've actually not needed to do much in the way of pitch correction in the past, since most of the time of any music mixing or composition I do tackle is usually of the synth and midi-sequenced variety, so tuning concerns and pitch problems very rarely come up.  The occasional sound effect has been nudged into key but that's usually been something fairly simple and easily accomplished by ear.

However, recently I wanted to sample a steel tongue drum, with one of the goals to make a VSTi of it.

(This magnificent bastard)

It's a lovely instrument, a slightly lavish Christmas present to myself last year. It's fun and easy to play, and quite meditative, but as you might expect, its pitch varies dramatically according to ambient temperature, by up to as much as a semi-tone sometimes.

This is okay so when you're just jamming for fun solo, but for the purposes of a VSTi some pitch correction is necessary - especially if you ever want to throw it into a composition with any other instruments. Which is where my adventure into the world of pitch-correcting plugins has come in.

Here's a small snippet of the session recording, to get a feel for the sort of sound a steel tongue drum produces:


For the steel tongue drum, the vibrato and overtones from the resonance - which is a huge part of the drum's sound - rule out pretty much anything other than Melodyne, which after some fairly exhaustive research appears to be the only polyphonic-capable pitch correction plugin floating around. It's tough to swallow, though - $300 is a big investment for a plugin, especially one that you would have need of infrequently. It would definitely be a must-have for anyone more heavily involved in recording and mixing music though.

This is probably to the surprise of absolutely nobody in audio - Melodyne is fairly well known as the gold-standard, standing head and shoulders over Auto-Tune. But in looking for alternatives, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of WavesTune! It can't handle polyphonic, but based on my admittedly limited experimentation with it, with vocals and a lot of other instruments the result is even smoother and more natural-sounding than Melodyne!

VariAudio in Nuendo (and Cubase too, presumably) wasn't too shabby either, although its analysis was somewhat spotty and required a great deal of intervention. Still, considering it comes with the program, I was also pleasantly surprised by it. By controlling how much you want to flatten the pitch on a segment-by-segment basis it was very easy to preserve the vibrato, which is something a lot of the pitch-correction plugins stomp all over.

I gave Audition's pitch correction tools a whirl too, for curiosity's sake. The Auto Pitch Corrector actually wasn't too shabby with basic tasks, but like any automatic process is prone to blowing up in your face horribly and spazzed out at the slightest hint of vibrato.  The manual pitch correction is a bit better and more versatile, but nice as the interface controls were, you would need to either have perfect pitch or pair it with some hardcore analysis, and its tolerance before it starts sounding horribly processed is extremely narrow. Still, it's a feature that could eventually catch up to Steinberg's VariAudio... if Adobe spends any time on it. The pitch manipulation tools in Audition took a massive step back after 3.0 and have never quite recovered.

For now, though, Melodyne and WavesTune get my votes of confidence! Urgh, now to decide how much use I'll get out of Melodyne in the future... $300 isn't horrific for a plugin of that calibre, but when the money is tight... maybe I should have bought it instead of the drum!