GarageBand has a native autotune feature that you can use pitch correction on your vocals or any other monophonic instrument such as bass or a guitar solo.
I will show you how to fix the pitch of a vocal performance without it sounding artificial. I will also show you how to get the heavy autotune effect that we hear in modern pop, RnB and hip hop tracks these days.
The first steps to do Pitch Correction in Garageband are:
- Select the audio clip you want to process.
- In the Inspector view, go to Effects->Audio->PitchCorrector and select “Drop Pitch”.
- Set the Pitch value for the correction and hear what it does to your audio clip. If you have a MIDI Keyboard connected to your mac, you can use it to control this parameter with your keyboard to fine tune the pitch correction in Garageband quickly with human emotion and feeling, instead of just using 1/100th’s of a semitone like software can’t do (yet!).
Common settings for this Pitch Correction effect will be around -2% to -10%, but it really depends on the original audio and the tempo of the song.
There are two modes for this Pitch Corrector: “Chromatic” (the default) and “Pitch”. “Pitch” corrects ONLY the pitch, but does nothing to the timbre of a track — only the pitch. This gives really natural sounding results when lowering a vocalist’s pitch by 2-4 semitones. Here is an example of what I mean with that last statement:
Pitch Correction is a useful tool for creating a vocal track. If you want to practice for a Karaoke contest or just need some extra inspiration, you can do it yourself with Garageband on your mac!