Recording Workshop: 6 AutoTune Tipps à la Post Malone

1 Find the right key

It is important to set the correct key of the beat in the plug-in, otherwise the vocals will sound out of tune. Without any knowledge of music theory, the best way to do this is using a keyboard. Play all the notes of an octave one after the other to the beat and note which 7 fit. Go to pianoscales.org and match the scales with your notes - done.

2 Pitch correction

This type of audible pitch correction is applied to many of Post Malone‘s tracks. To have full control over the effect, you should use it during recording. Post Malone plays the plug-in like an instrument during recording and can, therefore, influence the sound in real time. This way of working saves a lot of time but requires practice.

3 Melodyne & Autotune

Should you edit a vocal track afterwards with the Auto-Tune effect, the final result is predetermined, since the source material controls the effect. With programs like Melodyne that allow note-based audio editing, you can „play“ the vocal track together with the Auto-Tune effect: almost like recording with pitch correction.

4 Save CPU

When recording or editing vocal tracks with pitch correction, the use of these computationally intensive plug-ins costs a lot of CPU in the studio computer. Audio interfaces like the Antelope Audio Zen Go Synergy Core offer the possibility of calculating a special Auto-Tune version directly via the interface - this saves computing power!

5 With and without effect

Another tip for achieving the Post Malone sound is to supplement the tracks where the effect is audible with tracks that can do without the effect. For example, if the main voice has a clearly audible pitch correction effect, the backing vocals can easily do without it for more naturalness.

6 More thoughts

The use of pitch correction is common in current music. Nevertheless, „Auto-Tune“ is controversial. Users are accused of not being able to sing “correctly“, but effects that have been established for decades, such as distortion and delay effects, also conceal the playing errors of instrumentalists and, at the same time, provide a special sound image like Auto-Tune!