Have you wondered what the best pitch correction plug-in is for tuning vocal tracks? Spoiler alert, There’s isn’t one, there are several.

We ran a poll asking The Production Expert Community to vote for the pitch correction example they prefered the sound of the most using three popular audio pitch correction software applications; Antares AutoTune, Celemony Melodyne 4 and Synchro Arts Revoice Pro 3. We also left the untreated original vocal recording. We asked which one you preferred the sound of the most. The results are as follows, the number in brackets indicates the original example number. Below you can also hear each of the examples.

Whilst the results are of some interest the most interesting one is how few preferred the original performance. The performance was chosen because of the note drift on some notes and whilst not perfect it was not in the realm of bad singing by any stretch.

This seems to indicate that despite all the negative rhetoric often seen written in forums and on social media about tuning software it seems 9 in 10 preferred a tuned vocal in this case.

Have we become normalised to pitch perfect vocals? Is it possible to put out a track these days without using tuning software? If it's so much part of the modern production process why are so many artists so adamant about admitting to using it in the studio?