Subtitles of the Movie

There's a lot more to VariAudio than I've shown you, but there is another function that I'd like to show you. I've placed my recently recorded and VariAudio tune to backing vocals on this track, and renamed it appropriately Counterpoint, because this backing vocal will provide a counterpoint harmony to the lead vocal. I want to tighten up the vocal phrasing so it becomes more mechanical sounding to reflect the lyrical content. This is easy to accomplish by opening the file in the Sample Editor again and ensuring the VariAudio tab is open. If I zoom in a little, I can see the vocal slurs into the bar position. Now I want the phrasing to start and end exactly on the bar, more mechanical. If you look closely, you'll notice Cubase places its VariAudio rectangles on top of the wave form so that you can see where the bars start and end with ease. To be more rigid and more mechanical, this opening note, the Well part of the word Welcome should begin at bar 3. So all we need to do is drag the rectangle to the beginning of bar 3 to compress the length of the audio and push the start note to the bar. I'll go through all the notes manually to tighten up the vocal line. You'll notice when you do this that as you shorten one note, the note before it or after it is stretched or shrunken appropriately to make the phrasing fluid. I'll just go to bar 7 and do a similar function in a different way. I'll zoom into bar 7 first, now I need to ensure I've clicked on segments here. All I do now is drag the rectangle to the start of bar 7 and the note now starts here as opposed to before. All the time stretching is done courtesy of Cubase behind the scenes. How easy is that? I'm not sure how transparent this effect is on a lead vocal though. But for backing vocals like this, where I was a robotic type sound, it's ideal. Anyway, with a mixture of using both Pitch and Warp and the Segments tabs, you can achieve excellent results. Let's have a listen. "Welcome to surveillance state, welcome to surveillance state." Now even though I've spent time on pitch correcting and time tuning the phrasing, I want to now run the vocal through another pitch correction effect just to really restrict the human elements of the vocal line. Cubase has another Auto-Tune feature called Pitch Correct, and is easily used by placing it as an insert on the vocal file. I've clicked my Insert tab and navigate to the Pitch Correct plug-in found via Steinberg, Pitch Shift, Pitch Correct, the three gray stripes indicating it's a new VST3 effect. As usual, there are a number of presets to choose from. I'll choose Correction Male 1 Moderate. Now when I play the file through, I get a graphical representation of the pitch on the keyboard. "Welcome to surveillance state, welcome to surveillance state." Obviously because I've already VariAudio tuned the file, there isn't much deviation from the correct pitch. However, if you need a quick and easy pitch correction fix, this is the plug-in to use. It's very similar to Auto-Tune's interface, and does a good job emulating the sonic quality of Antares' world beating Auto-Tune. Fantastic, a brilliant plug-in, especially when you need to do some pitch correction rather quickly as opposed to going through all the fine detail like I've been doing over the last couple of tutorials. Brilliant.