For the letter P in our ongoing series of the A to Z of Waves, we have chosen Pitch as the topic. This article is going to briefly look at three Waves Pitch plugins - Waves Tune, Waves Tune Real-Time and SoundShifter.

Waves Tune

Waves Tune is a monophonic pitch correction plugin that has a workflow not too dissimilar to MIDI piano roll editing. It works in-sync with the Pro Tools timeline using ReWire taking control of the Pro Tools transport and playback. The most common application for Waves Tune is vocal pitch correction as it delivers very transparent results with the GUI being very easy to use. This isn't to say that Waves Tune is only good a getting transparent tuning results, oh no, it is also very good at producing very creative tuning effects. A stand out feature of Waves Tune is the ability to create vibrato. Let's say a vocalist failed to sing with vibrato in the performance - Waves Tune can take the straight pitch and produce vibrato after the fact very quickly.

Waves Tune Real-Time

Waves Tune Real-Time is a very cool pitch correction plug-in that makes light work of tuning tasks. What makes Waves Tune Real-Time different to Waves Tune is the ability to use it,  as the name suggests, in real-time... as in live. It lends itself perfectly to live vocals and for quick post tuning tasks producing very musical results. Waves Tune Real-Time is a very good tool for getting multi-tracked backing vocals in shape fast as all that needs to be set is key and speed of tuning.

SoundShifter Pitch

Waves SoundShifter Pitch is very good global audio tuning tool. Say you have an acoustic guitar recording that is overall a little sharp in pitch - Waves SoundShiter Pitch can gently flatten the overall pitch of the guitar to be more in line with the tuning of the mix. It is also very good for tuning drum hits such as snares, kicks and toms. Waves SoundShifter can pitch plus or minus one octave either in semitones or cents for fine tuning.