From the course: Music Production Secrets

Fix vocal Auto-Tune crossfades - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Music Production Secrets

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Fix vocal Auto-Tune crossfades

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- [Voiceover] If you usually only auto-tune one note or a small part of the vocal the way I do, then you probably run into this problem. There's always a little bump or glitch or something right where the auto-tuned part of the vocal meets the original part. I'm going to play you an example right here. - [Voiceover] ♫ Of the burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] And even if you crossfade this where these meet here I'll guarantee you, it's not going to sound good. - [Voiceover] ♫ The burning ♫ - [Voiceover] You always get some sort of glitch and the reason is for some reason the auto-tune creates a wafer that's slightly out of whack with what was there originally. You can see that the sign wave, let's pull this up a little. The sign wave of the vocal isn't meeting at all. It's a little out of sync and I don't know what the reason is why or anything. But I've worked on a few ways to fix this. The first one is to just line up the null points where the sine wave of the vocal crosses zero. We'll go in there, make a little cut. We're going to actually slide this piece of audio with just the tiniest amount. And let's go cut here where it's doing the same thing. Actually that would be the wrong way for it. So back out right here. So we find that crossing point. Where that audio crosses we are able to just nudge these together. It's a little tiny bit of timing change but really in the scheme of things I don't think you can hear that. Let's hear how that plays back. - [Voiceover] ♫ Burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] And there's still a little bit of something there. We can try a crossfade once we've nudged this into place. I had to really fine tune zooming in down to a couple of samples. Just to make sure I'm not doing something out of whack, like having vocals cross over each other. - [Voiceover] ♫ Of the burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] But there's still a little something wrong with that. I can hear that as well. So what I'll do at this point is get a chunk of audio here where we don't have any crossfades that are going to cause problems on either end. And then we'll send this over to RX 5 and we'll use their iZotopes Connect plug-in here. We'll send it over. It'll open up the stand-alone version of iZotope RX 5. This is a noise reduction and repair software program. I really like using it. Let's listen to it here in this realm. You can see the audio. - [Voiceover] ♫ Out of the burning de ♫ - [Voiceover] So you can see where that joint is right here. There's definitely like a glitch, a little bit of an anomaly. This is some low end content right here that we can just eliminate. Use the Gain Module. Set it at infinite reduction and bam. It's gone. It tampers with the fundamental a little bit right there but let's see what we got now. It's going to help in some respect. Let's also go to View. We're in Spectrogram Settings that's Extended Log. We want to go to Mel's or typical view. Or you can just hit the reset button right there. But that was good to see the low end component happening. - [Voiceover] ♫ Burning des ♫ - [Voiceover] So it's still a little glitchy when it hits the "ing" sound. So what we do, you can see there's different stuff going on here. In fact, the autotune portion here, you can see doesn't have the extended frequency range as well of the 96K file. It's dumbed it down a little bit so to speak, but that's going to be fine. Let's do this little sliver of audio here. We're going to go to Spectral Repair. And we're going to go to Replace and what this is going to do is kind of smooth these parts into each other. It doesn't always work and sometimes it sounds really strange. - [Voiceover] ♫ Burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] But for my money, that's going to make it through a mix. Hear that again. - [Voiceover] ♫ Burning dessert ♫ - [Voiceover] Sounds more like a vocal inflection. Let's send that back. Use the Connect plug-in here to just drop right in. Put it back in place. Close that. - [Voiceover] ♫ Of the burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] And then let's put it back into the mix. - [Voiceover] ♫ Of the burning desert ♫ - [Voiceover] We're able to take the glitchy file and edit and turn it into something clean that passes by and sounds like normal singing just by autotuning a little tiny snipit of the vocal. So that's a great way to work. Keep this kind of stuff in mind and use this trick anytime you got to seam and glue something together that's having problems.

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