[soundwave106]

This is where auto-tune actually can fall. Singing is not exactly all about hitting the "in equal temperament tune" note all the time.

Take the fantastic singer with great technical skill. Most pitch correction algorithms, as far as I know, are strictly based on equal temperament / 12TET. Fantastic singers are capable of hitting the right harmonics, some of which are not 12TET. Fantastic singers slide into notes, they use vibrato, they add "blue notes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_note). If you over-apply pitch correction, in other words, you could easily make a fantastic singer sound worse.

Let's also take the singer who is technically a bit pitch deficient, but has "character" that makes up for it. You don't want to make this type of singer too in-tune, either. Too much tuning might remove the "character".

I understand in the industry there are some engineers that are good enough to selectively apply auto-tune, to only fix obvious issues, and avoid the pitfalls. There are also some productions that just apply auto-tune to everything with no consideration of the content. The later will probably work for glossy pop productions, but if I was a really good singer (or a singer with "character") I probably wouldn't like the results.

[anon0]

That's not true, melodyne is capable of arbitrary tunings, and even has a feature where you can create custom scales.

[soundwave106]

Thanks for the information, that's one product I'm not too familiar with. I've demoed the Antares product and a couple of freebies. (It seems like there is a couple of newer plugins out there as well, eg Synchro Arts Revoice Pro).

The problem is, I'm not sure though that even a pure alternate tuning can work though for all examples. EG: for blue notes, what is "correct" varies with performers and style.

Now, I'm more talking about the "automatic modes"; I understand Melodyne offers a pretty impressive level of editing control (Antares did too from what I remember). So it would certainly be possible to get a really great take, and then hand-correct any truly off notes to whatever frequency you wanted.

As in many things (see: Photoshop and model photos), a lot of the reaction to the tool is less on how it could be used, and more on how it is being used in glossy "crap singer pop idol" productions.