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4. Pitch correction with Logic Flex Pitch

1

We’ve got an idea for how we want our vocals to fit in our Logic track, matching our lead line, yet our vocal take seems a little offpitch. Let’s sort that out.

2

Next we press E to enter the Editor for our vocal. In Editor we click Show/Hide Flex which opens our Flex options. Clicking Flex Pitch gives a visual representation of our vocal – clicking on the circles around each box indicates how far from the required pitch we are, numerically.

3

It’s apparent that aside from a few of our early notes, we’re quite far off the required pitch – clicking and dragging the centre circle – and we now have to adjust our notes to reach the right position.

4

We’ve done a broad correction to our vocal pitch – adjusting our notes to between 0 and 10 each way. However, as we can visually see, our vocal’s sound really isn’t a consistent pitch. The waveform drifts way out of the required boxed-in pitch area.

5

Clicking the top right and left allows us to reign in this ‘pitch drift’ – reducing the natural off-pitch vibrato and swooping. Clicking the bottom centre Vibrato circle allows us to further mould the pitch and reduce wobble.

6

It’s also an idea to carefully trim down any elongated notes by grabbing the side of each box and incrementally shortening their duration. This can help eliminate any prolonged off key warbling.

7

Now our vocal is looking and sounding a little more palatable. However some parts of our vocal sound a little too ‘corrected’.

Keep a considered grasp on the overall sound of the voice, and don’t let it get too robotic.

8

There’s still some problematic pitch drift. Click on the Scissors icon to make cuts to those parts of the vocal where there are more extreme issues with curves wandering out of the pitch marker area.

9

Using the Scissors tool to slice out those sections creates new pitch boxes more aligned to their specific location. There’s no limit to how deep into the audio you can go – but again, retain a close ear on the overall artificiality.

10

Once you’ve got a finer focus on these wayward areas in your project, zoom in and use the Pitch Drift/Vibrato circles in Logic to adjust the pitch frequency to fit.

11

Other qualities, like Gain on specific sections, and Formant transposition (represented in circles) can underline parts of the performance that weren’t as prominent before, and enhance sections.

12

While we’ve got some way to go before this track is finished, some adjustment with Flex Pitch has aligned our vocal to a more consistent pitch zone. How much you need to apply is down to you.