Transcription
In the past couple of years, I've heard songs that sounded really bad because of tuning mistakes. Either the autotune wasn't set correctly, or the engineer was a beginner. Today, I want to show you just a couple of those mistakes and how you can take your tuning game from beginner to expert.
The first major mistake is not setting the speed of the tuning plugin or the no transition accordingly to what the song needs. Let me show you the best way you can set up a tuning plugin. In this case, the Waves Tune Real-Time. After having the proper key, the proper scale, the proper range, we need to move to the speed and transition. If you want that classic autotune sound, you should use fast speed and fast no transition. For a lot of tracks, that's just way too much. How I like to set up Waves Tune Real-Time is to start at the minimum speed and minimum no transition and adjust first the no transition. After I have something that sounds pretty good, I move to the speed. You cannot fail by using this technique: first the no transition, then the speed. Link them and adjust accordingly to what fits the song best.
Another mistake that I see a lot of people doing is using the tuning plugin at the end of the processing chain. This is Waves Tune Real-Time at the end of the processing chain, and this is at the beginning of the chain. Why having the tuning plugin at the end of the chain is really important is because tuning plugins add artifacts; they have a certain sound. Have the tuning plugin first in the chain so you can make adjustments to your compressors, your EQs, your post-tuning processing accordingly to what you are hearing after you are doing the tuning. That's why having the tuning plugin at the end of the chain is a mistake.
Let me show you how I like to work. This is a bit more advanced, but it works best. When I start mixing a track, I like to print my tuning plugins. That means I like to run all the vocals through tuning. I do that because I don't want the tuning to change. Since the tuning plugin is reactive and it's reacting to the vocals, you don't get the same performance out of it. 100% mix revisions will sound different, but if you print the tuning plugin, then you will have the same result over and over again. That's really important when it comes to revisions. In Logic, you can do that in a couple of different ways. First option is, like I have here, all the audio events. You can hit G, that's merge, you can bounce the region and enable event effects, add the tuning on the event effect insert, and then hit render. Now I have the tuning printed in the audio, and no matter what I'm doing from this point, the tuning stays the same, reacts the same, and that's what I want. The second option that I like using is to use a new track, copy the audio on that track, copy the tuning, and then hit transform to rendered audio. All the audio events will render through the tuning plugin, and from this point, after I have the tuning printed, I can start with my normal processing.
The next mistake that I want to talk about is not using tuning on individual tracks. I see a lot of mixing engineers that are using tuning on buses. That's a mistake because if you have overlapping audio events, then the tuning will not work properly. In this session, I have a couple of backing vocals, and this is how it sounds with the tuning plugin on the bus. You can hear that it doesn't sound good. Let me add the same tuning but on individual tracks. Bypass it on the bus. By using tuning on individual tracks, this allows every single vocal to be tuned individually and not be cramped up in a bus where we have overlapping events. I think that's a really important thing that you have to consider. And these are three tuning mistakes that can really ruin your song. Don't make them.