Correcting the pitch

You are ready to start perfecting the vocals. Great! Now, there is no set order to do the following. You could even do this in a later stage of mixing, but I personally like to get my preperation in order and consider this part of that.

There are two parts of a vocal recording that you can perfect; pitch and timing. Keep in mind, you don’t have to do correction on the whole song. The first step is to listen to the track and spot where any problems may occur. Then – in Logic – use the Flex Tool to correct those issues. But if you want it to be perfect, than I know it’s tempting to run through the whole song. When you do, the whole process suddenly becomes a harmonized symphony between your eyes and ears to perfect the track

Pitch Correction

If given a choice many vocalists, myself included, don’t really want to use pitch correction. We want to get the job done right. But unfortunately, even if someone would sing on pitch there will always be moments where they are not quite hitting that note exactly. It’s just nice to know you can fix it in the mix.

Flex Pitch in Logic will make it visible whether a vocal is considered on pitch or whether it’s flat or sharp. Turn the Flex Tool on and then select Flex Pitch for your vocal track. Your track is being analyzed and in a few seconds you’ll be able to see what Logic thinks of it.

Your sound region is covered in blocks, some  may go upwards (sharp) others downwards (flat), like in my sample above. The more of a block is visible the more Logic considers the note to be off. Keep in mind, that Logic only considers it off compared to the first nearest whole note. There’s no comparison made to chords in the music. This is where your own ears come in.

If you want the note to be completely on key, you can click the edge of the block and drag it to the center line. It will get the value of zero (0) when it’s absolutely perfect. However it is fine to have a 10% off pitch. You can select all blocks at once and drag it into place to work faster. Also, you can right click either the full sound region or one note. This will give you access to options of perfect pitching or resetting it back to the old settings.

To correct a note that’s completely off, take the edge of the block and lift it up until it comes around at the bottom. This means you lifted the note up a full note. You can do the same thing with a downwards motion to bring a note down.

However, you can do so much more by double clicking the sound region. You should get a more detailed view. Click on the tab Track to see the wave file and then scroll untill you see the all kinds of lines over the region:

These lines align with the keyboard on the left. To change a note now, you can just simply select the note (by clicking the line) and drag it up or down. Make sure your mouse shows a hand as a pointer when doing this. If you don’t, you’ll probably access Fine Pitch which will work so much slower.

And that leads us straight into even more cool things that you can do. When you click the note you’ll see 6 bullets appear. This gives you an even greater control! For instance you can even change the pitch within a note. You can drag each bullet to change it’s properties. This is what they are for:

Left top: Pitch Drift –  Change the pitch leading into the note
Center top: Fine Pitch – Change the pitch of current note
Right top: Pitch Drift – Change the pitch leading out of the end note (this can make it sound more fluent with the following note)
Left bottom: Gain – Change the gain (volume)
Center Bottom: Vibrato – Change the vibrato
Right bottom: Formant Shift – Change the intonation

Finding the right combination between shifting a note up and down, and then changing the intonation could make the difference between making someone sound like a Chipmunk or have more of a natural sound. Also, when you become pretty handy in using these tools, you can then add background harmonies without the vocalist ever having sung them.

When changing these settings be sure to keep checking how it sounds to make sure it all sounds natiral. Well, unless it’s your goal to use the ‘autotune’ sound (aka making the voice do things that are humanly impossible).

Now if you’re still in the detailed Track mode, you can also see more options on the left. I’ve not yet used any of them other than the “Pitch correction”, which I sometimes set to a 100. But all the other options sound pretty straight forward to me. Realize that all settings on this side apply to the whole track not just the selected sound region.