Do Your Own T-Pain Effect

If you're not a great singer, but own a Mac, then you're in luck. This might be the key to your musical career. A system called Auto-Tuning, is used to automatically tune the voice, and sometimes used to produce prominent altered vocals. This feature was made popular by the rapper T-Pain. He recently appeared on Ellen, and showed his iPhone app that makes the processed voice possible for iPhone users.

I first heard this vocal effect on the Cher song, Believe. This was recorded back in 1998, and the vocal effect was considered a trade secret. Which left me wondering back then, on how they did it. They claimed to use a vocoder, but I did some research, and found that a vocoder only produces sounds like "Mr. Roboto" or Sound Wave's voice from the 1986 Transformers TV series. I guess it was their way of preventing others from imitating the sound.

Now, it is widely used in the music industry, here and abroad. Locally, I've already noticed this on one of Tony Gonzaga's song. If you pay a little closer to Tony's voice, you will hear a slightly auto-tuned transition on the notes going up. Some noticeable, some not, auto-tuning has gained some criticisms on its use as even novice singers can have a perfect tune every time.

You too can create your own sound by downloading or buy softwares that specialize on this, but I've found an easier way to do it using Garage Band on my Macbook. Here's how to do it on Garage Band '09:

Launch the Garage Band App and choose 'New Project' and Voice, then click 'Choose'

Give your project a name and click 'Create'

You will see 2 tracks, 1 for Male and 1 for Female voice. Add a new track by clicking the '+' sign at the bottom left of the screen.

This will create a new track named No Effects, select this track by clicking on it

On the lower right portion you will see an Input Source, if you have an external mic, select Mic 1 or Mic 2, which ever works for you. (I'm using a bluetooth headset that's why it says Mono 1 BH08N)

You may turn on the monitor by selecting 'On'. Turning it on will let you hear the sound output in your internal speaker or headphones if you got 1 plugged in.

After selecting the input source go back to the lower left option. Beside the  '+' button  you will see a Scissor like icon, click it

It will bring up an Audio Region option

Slide the Enhance Tuning to 100 if you want a T-Pain effect, and lower if you like an unnoticeable auto-tune sound.

Check on the 'Limit to Key' box.

Do some test on your mic, to make this work, you should try singing some melodies, speaking will do nothing to your voice.

Click on 'Save Instrument' and name it T-Pain or Auto-Tune, so you don't have to do these steps all over again.

Finally, sing songs and record some tunes. Bring out the inner Cher or T-Pain in you.

Try it at home, it'll be so much fun than playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero. While at it you might also want to do some experiment on some effects embedded in Garage Band like chipmunk voices or alien voices. This had left me tinkering with Garage Band again the whole day. I call this the 'Musical Arranger Hero', or the 'T-Pain: Rock Band'.