The Song Fight Bulletin Board

The genre calls for auto-tune, but I am overwhelmed by the list of plugins that come with Reaper. What's a good one?

Is there a page out there somewhere that describes all the plugins included with Reaper?

ReaPitch (in MIDI mode if you want to control the target pitch via MIDI). But consider using the free "GSnap" VST plugin instead; it's much friendlier. Also, it's hard to get the brutal sound out of ReaPitch that you usually want if you use pitch correction for effect.

Thanks, I added GSnap to my plugins. Couldn't get it to do what I wanted though -- that flat robotic sound. Guess I should read the documentation. . .

The "not so" preset is quite good at robotizing things, though it doesn't sound quite as brutal as Autotune does. If I wanted something extremely robotic, I'd probably help things along by adding a short delay (< 10 ms) to some phrases.

I did use a 20ms delay to get a mechanical effect. I also compressed the hell out of the vocal -- through an MXR pedal on recording, then through the ReaComp VST, then through a prset on the ReaXComp VST, which seemed to hepl, and finally when I bumped the volume of the final WAV.

The GSnap scale setting didn't seem to take. I would set it to another key, but when I opened the same dialog box again, it would be set back to A major. Even with the "Not so" preset, I could not detect any difference in the audio. Other VSTs have an effect, so I don't know what's up.

[EDIT] If I turn off the delay I can hear the effect, but it makes me sound warbly -- no doubt because my pitch is all over the place.

I think to get what I wanted, I should have snapped to MIDI notes. But I haven't figured out how to set that up yet.

[EDIT} With a little help from the internet, I figured that out, but it wasn't a big improvement. No matter, the song is done and submitted. My grasp of Reaper, VST,and MIDI is a little further along.

If you're using Reaper, try Reavoice for fakey sounding midi-controlled autotune. To me it doesn't sound so much like the autotune you hear on the radio as it sounds like those cheap "sampler" keyboard toys from the 80s that let you record any noise and then play it back at any pitch using the keyboard. Messing with the algorithm could probably make it sound totally different though.

Reapitch Reatune, I will admit that one some fights I have actually used it for pitch correction that you aren't supposed to notice, you're supposed to think I just hit the right note to begin with. I've never used it for lead vocals (except mixed 50/50 with the dry version of the same take to make a "chorus") but for background vocals, I'm guilty of just slapping it on instead of doing another take. I've also used it on guitars and basses that I thought were tuned before I recorded them but didn't sound so well tuned when I played the track back.

About the best you can get with ReaVoice and friends is if you use one of the Elastique pitch shifting algorithms; I believe "Soloist" is optimized for vocals. Then, choose whichever of the parameters sounds best. Basically, preserving formants (which is what these parameters are all about) is what makes it not sound like cheap pitch shifting. Admittedly, Elastique's formant mangling sounds pretty ugly, but I guess you get what you paid for.