How to tune vocals in REAPER using ReaTune

let's talk about pitch correction you can go extreme and do something like the t-pain effect which is basically just an extreme version of Auto tuning the pitch correction can also be done in a much more transparent way the situation I have here is that I like my performance but I feel it could be a little sweeter especially on the ends of some of the lines so let's look at reapers built-in tuning tool retune so how do we tune a focal using retune and why not just resync it well sometimes tuning is just faster than resyncing and sometimes resyncing just isn't possible like maybe you've got a cold or maybe you had your cousin from the other side of the world come and sing on your song and she's gone back home and you just noticed that one of the notes is a little bit flat well it's kind of impractical to have her back to sing so why not just spend a minute and correct that note that's wrong so how do we use retune well it's a VST effect plug-in which basically means we can go to the effects tab on our vocal Channel so we want to make sure we're on the vocal here not the vocal folder but the actual vocal tract and we'll click on the effects button break up the effects window and we're looking for retune so I'm going to be on all plugins here and I'm going to use the filter down here and just type in tune and this will show me all the plugins that have the name tune in them so I'm looking for this retune here double click ok so what's going on here well retune does a number of things but we're going to use the manual correction feature and that's this third tab here at the top of the window now we're going to go to the end of our song and I actually know which line this is it's right here at the very end just going to zoom in this line right here and before I do anything we'll just take a listen just say I think that could be a little bit nicer so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to in retune here turn on the manual correction and I'm going to play that again and if we watch in the retune window will see some squiggly lines start to get drawn just say okay so what retune is done here is it's showing me my pitch and so the squiggly line is my pitch and you can see that this this note right here this is one of the ones that kind of bugged me a little bit it's not bad I'm going to zoom in a little bit more I'll use the Plus signs here so you can see that this is supposed to be a G and I'm kind of a little sharp and then I'm on it and then I go really sharp so let's we could actually use this timeline here to to change our play back start point so I'm going to hit play again we're going to hear it the same you now if I want to make that a nice solid G all I need to do is I'm just clicking and I'm drawing a line seems pretty simple it's take a listen to that this is not sure if you could tell in the mix there but it is just a little bit sweeter in fact what I'm going to do is I'm going to solo the vocal so we can hear if there's any artifacts because sometimes tuning can leave some digital kind of artifacts in the sound so let's just make sure that it is nice and clean the same way oh I just heard on the end of way there I think that I could be better see I'm like so it looks like it's supposed to be an e so let's draw a line across like this let's listen to that again the same way ah that is better now it's a fairly subtle difference but just to give you an idea as to how much that can change let's say I even wanted to change that note like right now it's an e but let's say I wanted to make it a G I could take this little line I've drawn and draw it up here let's hear that the same way way yeah well it was a little bit wonky but it is affecting the note quite a bit now to adjust how quickly it reacts to that we actually have to go back over to our correction tab and there's this attack time function and this is how quickly retune reacts to a note that's off and just pulls it into tune so the shorter the time is the more accurate the note but also the more artificial it can sound so let's say I bring this down to 150 go back to our manual correction here maybe I can extend this line a little bit let's hear that again the same oh wait yeah yeah so I can you know if I wanted to I could probably even get away with trying to change the note I sang but I don't want to I'm actually happy with a beanie but I'd like it to be a better e so let's take a listen to that now I think that setting that slightly faster attack time made it sound a little bit better so let's take another listen the same oh way and I'm going to turn it off so I'm just going to uncheck the box here we're going to hear that the same tuning Oh way it's subtle and it's very transparent what it's doing and that's exactly what I want I don't want it to sound like it was tuned I wanted to just sound like I sang it a little bit better so let's hear that in context the same excellent that I'm much happier with now the backing vocals may also be a little bit out so I'm going to put retune on our backing vocals as well so I'll go over to our effects here or rather our harmony I should call it and it's already filtering for tune so let's let's put that on but instead of using the manual correction I'm going to go to this other correction tab here where we change the attack time last time and I'm going to check off automatic pitch correction and this song is in the key of C major so I'm going to change this to C major now when it plays it will correct only two notes in the key of C so let's just move this down a little bit let's just take a listen to this first just say that does actually sound just a little bit better you'll see the graphic here is showing us some interesting looking stuff I'm actually going to zoom out on our main timeline here and go to the beginning of this chorus and what you'll see I'm actually what I'll do is I'm going to solo the harmony and when I play back just watch the readout here this window we come and go in the wink of an eye time so long after long goodbyes we are what we're seeing is the red line being what I actually saying and the green sort of filling in what it's pulling it into tune with now I could make that sound even more artificial I could hear some crackling and stuff in there if I set my attack time to zero we almost do get a wake t-pain kind of thing time rolls on after long goodbyes we are so we can adjust this to get it to kind of a sweet spot where it's not being pulled in too quickly and sounding like that and also it gets pulled in quickly enough so that we don't have anything that seems out of tune I thought 150 sounded pretty good on the other one so I'm going to use that here as well close the window unsolo that and just take a listen to this last course again time on out the long goodbye to say great so those are two ways you can correct notes in Reaper using region

Channel: Audiohackr

Views: 141,881

Rating: 4.9601827 out of 5

Keywords: REAPER (Software), DAW, digital audio workstation, audio recording, audio production, audio engineering, music recording, music production, how to record music, beginner, tutorial, instruction, help, tips, Audiohackr

Id: Unf151LoED4

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/a-man-from-earth]

Another great little video from Audiohackr. This one shows you don't need expensive third party plugins for autotuning. Reaper comes with one that sounds really good!

[u/crossjoint]

This was very helpful

[u/purestducks]

great little video thar