GVST GSnap

I guess everyone knows or at least heard a little bit about Antares Audio Technologies and their legendary Auto-Tune plug-in. It uses phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings. In addition to being used to subtly change pitch, with some settings it can be used as an effect to deliberately distort the human voice.

Auto-Tune was used to produce that Cher's "Believe" effect, recorded in 1998. When first interviewed about this, the sound engineers claimed that they had used a vocoder, in what Sound on Sound magazine perceives as an attempt to preserve a trade secret. R&B singer T-Pain has been credited with revitalizing the technique in contemporary popular music by making active use of it in his songs, a style that has since gone on to be imitated by numerous other R&B artists.

In 2009, Time magazine quoted an unnamed Grammy-winning recording engineer as saying, "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood [soundtrack] albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

Auto-Tune is an amazing plug-in but it costs a lot. Luckily there's free auto-tune effect plugin too and it's called GSnap. It can be used subtly to correct the pitch of a vocal, or, with more extreme settings, to create some effects. For GSnap to work effectively, the input signal should be monophonic, at a good level and reasonably noise-free. For example, a clean, mono vocal recording, without excessive noise or reverb. Effect plug-ins should be placed after GSnap in the signal chain.

GSnap does it's job surprisingly good :) Here's a little demo I found on YouTube:



Download: http://www.gvst.co.uk