I saw an article about this new karaoke (spl?) machine for your TV which helps correct pitch, and I know that this technology exists for more professional people. Any singers out there that know of a good voice box for the singer in my band? He’s ok, definitely good for what we do, but he could use a bit of help staying on key from time to time. If the box has other accessories (echo, etc) that’d be cool too.
Oh yea, since this is gonna be an X-mas/birthday gift, it has to be relatively inexpensive if possible. Anyone out there have or know of a good box they’d recommend?
It sounds like some kind of pitch shifter. It processes signals and can change the pitch of a note without changing its duration. It can be a component of an equalizer which modifies input signals (like from a microphone or guitar pick-up) before they are output through speakers etc.
As Interface wrote, you can do it in the mixing process. ProTools is a mixing/editing software. It is done to pre-recorded signals because if someone has bad pitch it’s not usually predictable and you don’t know which notes are going to be the bad ones. I’ve never heard of it done live – at least not without being really, really obvious (if you’ve seen the movie Stargate the bad guy, Jaye Davidon’s voice was seriously pitch shifted throughout the film for that eerie mechanical quality.)
The one and only time I went to a karaoke bar, we did notice that the pitch of everything sounded rather compressed, as if high and low ends of each frequency was clipped. (If it had been exaggerated even more, I would have sounded like Cher in her song “Believe.”) This disguised the true awfulness of my voice, but it certainly didn’t “correct” my pitch and definitely didn’t sound “better”.
The best way to correct his pitch would be to get him some really decent performance monitors. Like the earphone kind, so he can hear himself better when he rehearses.
The Antares ATR-1a uses algorithms to quickly compare an input signal to what it interprets it should be and then outputs the corrected version through the speakers with such a minimal delay. It’s most often used in a controlled studio setting to correct pitch (e.g. if a singer was singing along to rough tracks where the instruments may not have been just right – if a singer was keeping his/her pitch to the instruments, you’d have to correct it a touch later). It can be used live if the songer is usually pretty accurate.
It costs anywhere between $400 and $800+ U.S. (the price discrepancies are crazy!). So it would be a pretty expensive gift for a band-mate.
It’s use in live performances is still worrisome:
Italics mine. Correcting a singer to the wrong note would be worse! Hence the suggestion for decent performance monitors.
You’re best bet is still to correct the pitch problem at the source – the singer. Even sticking an earplug in one ear so he can hear himself better can make a world of difference. (And won’t look as goofy as sticking a finger in your ear à la Spinal Tap.)