They are three of the most lauded vocal tuning plugins money can buy, but which is best suited to your particular corrective and/or creative needs? Here, we’re drilling down into the nitty gritty of Melodyne, Auto-Tune, and RePitch to help you make the right buying decision.

Celemony Melodyne 5

Widely regarded as the apex predator of tuning plugins (be that for vocals or any other instrumentation), Celemony’s incredible plugin was the first to facilitate not only direct graph-based editing, but also polyphonic capability in the form of Direct Note Access (DNA) – rarely has the word ‘game-changing’ been so apt in the field of music technology.

Four tiered versions are available, from the top-flight Melodyne 5 Studio and Editor down to the more affordable Melodyne 5 Assistant and Essential. Using Editor or Studio to fix up monophonic vocals feels almost facile, given their ability to freely adjust individual notes within guitar, piano and other polyphonic parts. It could be argued, therefore, that if you’re only ever going to be using it for vocal tuning, Melodyne 5 Assistant is the one to buy, stepping down to monophonic voicing only, but featuring all the main editing tools.

Whichever version you opt for, right from the moment you import your first audio clip (via real-time capture or effortless ARA2 transfer in DAWs that support it) and start dragging its constituent notes around in the time/pitch graph, Melodyne feels nothing short of magical. As well as the all-important alteration of pitch and timing, the software affords total and perfectly intuitive control of note duration, dynamics, formants, sibilance, breath sounds and more – literally everything you need to make any vocal sound exactly how you want it to from all angles. There’s no automatic real-time pitch correction mode onboard, a la Auto-Tune, and all that fluidity and power is reflected in the complexity of the interface, but for the offline manipulation of vocals at the elemental level, Melodyne is as good as it gets.

Pros

• Incredibly detailed and flexible

• Top-tier versions can tune individual notes within polyphonic parts

• Exquisitely fine control of formants, breath noise, sibilance and more

• Melodyne 5 Assistant is enough for vocals

Cons

• Can be overwhelming in its scope

• No real-time mode

• Polyphonic DNA adds a lot to the price if you need it

Check out our recent article Melodyne In Pro Tools - The Expert's Guide.

Synchro Arts RePitch

The latest in their acclaimed series of vocal correction tools, RePitch draws on the core technologies behind Synchro Arts’ flagship Revoice Pro application in the realisation of a slick, streamlined plugin for automatic and guided vocal tuning and stretching. Like Melodyne, it’s a non-real-time processor, so the vocal has to be imported and recalculated with every processing change, but ARA 2 transfer makes this a snap for those with compatible DAWs, while a friction-free VST/AU/AAX capture method has everyone else covered.

Having imported your vocal, selecting a processing preset – ‘Snap All To Note Centers’ or ‘Snap All To Scale Note Centers’ (with the scale automatically or manually set) or ‘No Pre-Process (Manual Editing only)’ – might be all it takes to get the job done. If not, though, RePitch offers a comprehensive box of tools with which to tweak various audio properties within its interactive graph display. Detected notes are presented as blocks – splittable into further blocks, of course – containing ‘handles’ for adjustment of note centre and modulation, as well as timestretching; but you can go full-on freehand with the Draw tool if required, directly reshaping the pitch profile as you see fit. Volume is also manipulable, Warp markers can be placed for timestretching the whole audio capture, and while there’s currently no way to move blocks around on the timeline, that’s coming in a future update, we’re told.

Sitting somewhere, conceptually, in between Auto-Tune and Melodyne, RePitch strikes a great balance between ease-of-use and functionality, and the transparency of its pitchshifting and timestretching algorithms is hugely impressive. On top of all that, it also cleverly connects to its sibling vocal alignment plugin, VocAlign Ultra, automatically tuning the latter’s Guide track for imposition on any number of Dub tracks.

Pros

• Fast, preset-driven workflow

• Straightforward, focused parameters

• Supremely transparent results

• Can route corrected vocals to VocAlign Ultra

• The cheapest of the three here

Cons

• No real-time mode

• Time-based tools not yet implemented

Want to know more? Check out our Synchro Arts RePitch First Look article here.

Antares Auto-Tune Pro

The grandaddy of vocal tuning solutions, Auto-Tune has been around for over two and a half decades now, but remains as popular as ever among home studio and pro producers alike. As with Melodyne, there are numerous versions available, but here we’re looking at Auto-Tune Pro, which sits at the top of the catalogue and has the distinction of being the only entrant in this particular round-up to offer real-time retuning as well as an ‘offline’ mode for more detailed work.

In Auto mode, then, all you do is select your monophonic voice type (Soprano, Alto/Tenor, etc), key and scale, then dial in your desired retuning speed (slower for natural sounding results, faster for jumpy, T-Pain-style effects), deviation amount, vibrato depth and humanising (of sustained notes) level, or switch to Advanced view for deeper control of vibrato and scale customisation. There’s MIDI input for keyboard-controlled vocal pitching, too; the mildly iconic central display shows the current output pitch and the amount of change being made to the input signal as it happens; and the whole thing just feels fantastic in use – slick and responsive.

Graph mode sees Auto-Tune Pro transform into something more like Melodyne and RePitch, with your vocal imported via real-time capture or ARA transfer, then reshaped using Correction Objects (Curves, Lines and Notes), which are edited to define the pitch contour. Timestretching and warping are also on the cards, but as in real-time mode, all of this is strictly monophonic – polyphonic source material isn’t supported.

Ultimately, Auto-Tune Pro’s selling points are the maturity and excellence of its pitching algorithm, and the effectiveness and performance of its primary real-time mode. The Graph mode, meanwhile, can’t realistically compete with Melodyne in terms of features, flexibility or outright power, but as a supplemental system to the headline real-time tuning, it’s certainly a worthy inclusion.

Pros

• Automatic and real-time

• Low latency mode for live use

• Quick to use

• Strong creative angle

• Graph mode enables a good degree of offline tweaking

Cons

• Monophonic

• Expensive

Watch Eli Krantzberg’s video in his article Get Natural Sounding Vocals With Antares Auto-Tune Unlimited.

Which Is The Best?

In short, then, as we’ve aimed to made clear, each of the top three vocal tuning plugins has its own strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully, our round-up, with its summary Pros and Cons, will help you to make the best choice for your individual musical needs.

What Do You Use?

Do you use Melodyne, RePitch or Auto-Tune Pro for your vocal productions? Tell us what you love about it in the comments.