AutoTune RTAS Not TDM

Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.

This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.

‘til next time… take care,
Jed