That hard-tuned, robot-like sound, first popularised by Cher, has now become something of a staple in modern pop
It might feel like a relatively new concept within the production psyche, but the process that we describe as ‘hard-tuning’ has been around for nearly 30 years.
Back in 1997, audio software company Antares released a new piece of software which it called Auto-Tune. Its sole purpose was to analyse an incoming audio signal, before correcting any imperfections in its pitch in real time. Prior to this, it was not uncommon for studios to play vocal parts into samplers, and correct serious tuning anomalies using the production equivalent of keyhole surgery. It was a labour-intensive process, and one that Auto-Tune eradicated overnight. Moreover, the product name became an adjective, mistakenly applied whenever an artist used pitch correction software (much like the famous Hoover/vacuum cleaner paradigm).
Rock-solid tuning
It didn’t take very long for early adopters of the Auto-Tune technology to realise that by increasing its auto-correction response time, you could engineer a sound which was quite otherworldly. Technically, the process is very different from vocoding, but the resulting output was certainly not a million miles away. It sounded different and contemporary, thanks to the lack of any remaining humanistic quality or inaccuracy.
Less than a year from its release date, Auto-Tune made one of its most notable appearances on Believe, a huge hit by Cher. This extreme use of pitch correction was coupled with a vocoder,
Barry King/WireImage provided by the Digitech Talker pedal. While this release was not the first use of extreme pitch correction, it was certainly the moment where the concept, which became known as ‘hard-tuning’, picked up considerable traction. One genre that significantly adopted this process was R&B, and this concept has remained a part of its production style ever since.
Getting tuned
Antares clearly hit the market with a game-changing product. Auto-Tune became the must-have product, whether it was used as originally intended, as a quick and easy way to adjust tuning inaccuracy, or pushed it to its extremities for this new and highly addictive sound.
It didn’t take very long for other products to pick up the baton with this style of processing, as many off-the-shelf DAWs implemented their own versions of the Auto-Tune concept. Many of these were very useful, particularly for those on a budget, but they all seemed to fall slightly short of the benchmark set by Antares.
Shuffle forward to the year 2000, and Celemony Software entered the marketplace with its contender to the pitch correction crown, Melodyne. It wasn’t really the same form of product, but it was certainly impressive
