BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and we are taking a look at the pitch correction tool that comes with Logic. Now, what’s really cool about the pitch correction tool is that it’s integrated directly into Logic, so there’s no messing around with authorization or anything like that. It works right out of the box. Of course, the most common use for pitch correction tools is to correct those little nuances in pitch where your singer might be off a little bit. Let’s see how that works in this situation. I have a pre-loaded clip here. I’m going to bypass it just so we can hear it.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION BYPASSED]

Okay. So, I’m going to take that and throw a basic pitch correction tool over it. I got my response set to fast right now, but let’s take it down to the middle for more gradual pitch correction. Set here, you can use global tuning or turn that on and off right now. We’ll use global tuning.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now, it looks like our pitch correction tool is not quite reading the key correctly, so I’m going to turn off global tuning and set this to chromatic. Now let’s see what we’ll get. What it will read is it will read the notes she’s singing and look at each individual note and correct the little tiny detuning that’s there but it won’t take it any further than it needs to go. It’s not going to correct for chord or scale. It’s just going to go for a standard chromatic which means it hits all the main keys on the keyboard. Just play it back.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now when she goes off key, you’ll notice that the blue is out either to the left for flat notes or to the right for sharp notes, and you’ll see the red slider try to catch up with it. Now, let’s speed it up and see how fast it catches up with it and what effect that has on the audio.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now, you’ve probably heard this effect on a lot of pop music in the last few years. This is kind of an extreme way of doing that. Another way to, if you want to get that effect, would be to set this to low and play it back.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

And then you set a different key. So let’s try a major scale first of all.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

But now you’ll notice it’s changed our key, so I’ll take the fast down a little bit and go back to chromatic. This will slow down that response.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now, it gets some crazier effects. We can go in and actually set minor keys and harmonics that aren’t necessarily in tune with the original key she was singing in.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

You can also set up the root key to be different. So, if I go back to my major scale, set it to D.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now, some of the crazier effects included with this are the drone effect.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

And finally, the single effect. Let’s put it to A for this.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Now, for most of us, the way we’ll be using this is to correct vocals. You want to keep the pitch correction kind of slow, either in the middle or a little bit below that for proper pitch correction. Make sure you know what key you’re in if you can. If you know exactly what key this song is (and I think this one might have been in A but I can’t remember) and then know whether it’s in a minor chord or major scale or a lot of times chromatic will actually change the notes that need to be changed and correct them, the right way without having to mess around too much with scales and chords. Let’s listen to that really quickly.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

Look here.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

And we can play that back one more time with this set to fast.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A VOCAL TRACK IN APPLE LOGIC WITH PITCH CORRECTION ENGAGED]

All right. Well that’s it for the pitch correction tool that goes with Logic. I’ll be looking at some of the Antares plugins seen on the web site, but for now I’m Bill Holland and this is Gearwire.Com.