Autotune your voice using fantastic audio plugins like Waves Tune Lite or Morphoder and start singing jingles even if you’ve never sung a steady note in your life!
Autotune in Popular Culture
Many popular artists use the auto tune effect in their music. The most famous of these is T-Pain who creates a certain sound to his singing voice that many audio creators try to replicate so much so that many call it the ‘T-Pain effect’. In this podcast episode I mention two of the best audio plugins I’ve found that can help you to sound like T-Pain, Akon, Ke$ha or even Cher in her hit “Believe”.
What’s the Best Version of Adobe Audition?
Tom who listens to the podcast in the UK emailed recently to ask me what my favourite version of Adobe Audition is. He’s on version 3.0 and expressed his concern about upgrading to CS5.5 as he’s heard that many of the features are missing.
In my opinion Adobe Audition CS5.5 took 1 step forward (it was finally compatible with Mac) but 2 steps back in that it lost many of the cool features from 3.0 and previous versions. I remember using Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium, that was a great bit of kit, I was forever using the ‘paste mix’ feature before the invention of the multitrack.
Adobe Audition has recently come on in leaps and bounds – the latest version is Adobe Audition CS6 – and it’s the best version I’ve seen. I’ve even heard Pro Tools users mention that CS6 stands up well alongside Pro Tools. The great news is that Adobe will let you upgrade for a fraction of the price of buying new even if you’re making the jump from version 1.5 or higher!
How To Autotune Your Voice
If you can’t sing to save your life you’ll be pleased to hear about autotuning and vocoding. There are many plugins that can achieve a singing effect and they work with many of the popular DAWs like Pro Tools and Adobe Audition. I show you how they work in this podcast episode.
Here are the plugins I recommend:
Best Autotune Plugin
This plugin will make your voice sing. Just play your voice into the plugin, it will analyze the input then you can then play the notes you’d like your voice to sing and get a beautiful result. This can have a very practical use if you’re branding a radio station with its own sonic logo. All you need to do is have your voice over artist speak the station name in a monotone voice the plug it into the Waves Tune Lite plugin, play the notes and voila! You’ll have a sung sonic logo by your own radio station voice over.
It’s even possible to notch the voice up a few octaves and achieve various different effects. Listen to my examples in this podcast episode.
Best Vocoder Plugin
Vocoding a voice is another wonderful way to make a plain voice over sing. There was an elementary vocoder in Adobe Audition 3.0 which would allow you to mix your voice with a musical composition or sound effect and make your voice sound exactly like the element you choose. If you’re serious about the vocoder effect you should look into the Morphoder plugin from Waves Audio. It takes your voice and changes it to make it sound like you’re singing.
Here are my top 4 Morphoder plugin presets:
- Bunny
- Major Tom
- Minor Organic
- Robbie
Listen to how I use these vocoder effects in this podcast episode.
Thanksgiving & Black Friday
A very happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and listeners. Black Friday is coming, one of the biggest long retail weekends of the year, and many stores will offer amazing discounts, offers and competitions. You can view all the Music Radio Creative Black Friday deals here.
If you’re thinking about getting some studio kit or other radio, audio or podcasting equipment from Black Friday to Cyber Monday do check out my resources page where I talk about all the studio equipment, web services and audio gear that I’d recommend to you.
New Media Expo 2013 #nmx
Music Radio Creative will be at NMX 2013 and we hope to see you there in Las Vegas!
Remember to leave a comment on this episode with your thoughts on autotune and vocoding and contact me with any examples you’ve made. I’d love to hear them!
