Anand Holla (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 29, 2011)

 

Strumming his guitar gently, music director Shekhar, who is in his Bandra studio, randomly sings ‘Oh oh oh wo wo wo’ in a loop.

The music software - Cubase, in this case - maps out the vocal track in a visual grid. Shekhar zooms in and selects individual recorded notes or blocks of notes, cuts them, copies them and pastes them in other places just as one may do with text on a Microsoft Word file. He then runs this through vocal tweaking tool Auto tune.

Within seconds, the software pushes and pulls his notes to the right pitch so they sound as they are supposed to, in that scale. This instantly sounds like a great hook to a peppy number.

Ram Sampath says music lovers are sick of listening to unrealistically perfect music

In his studio, music director Ram Sampath, of Bhaag D K Bose fame, switches on another vocal altering tool, Melodyne, on Cubase, which can alter not just the pitch but even the rhythm and modulation of a recorded voice.

From the recorded track of an amateur vocalist, Ram pinches out a zig-zagged curve and says, “The note is pitching out by this much”. He studies the curves, splices some and smoothens some by altering their compression and EQ levels.

The tone now sounds fuller and deeper. When the singer hits the low notes, it sounds as if he is woken up from his slumber. “It seems he is playing hide-and-seek with the pitch,” Ram chuckles as he sets the tune right.

Given that the voice can More >