# I compared 4 pitch correction plugins. Here are the results!



## QuiteAlright (Jul 11, 2021)

Hello all! I was wondering how similar current pitch correction plugins are to each other, and which ones have the highest quality. So I tested several of them out, and I want to share the results for anyone else who's interested here. I posted this first on KVR and Reddit, but wanted to share here as well.
Methodology​Tuning out of pitch vocals is the most common use case for these plugins, but largely, they sound very similar when making minor adjustments. So in order to test them in a way that would expose some weaknesses, I put them through a stress test.
I picked a vocal sample which was already in tune, from an Alicia Keys song, and pitched it 5 semitones up. This is a major enough change that we can easily hear artifacts and compare the results, so it makes it very interesting to compare them. However, I'll acknowledge that this isn't a typical use case for these, so it's possible that this is a bit unfair towards plugins that are optimized for subtle changes.
Results​Please hear for yourself how each plugin did with this. I'll add my own thoughts, as well as some clarification, below.
Original (for reference)
Melodyne
Waves Tune
CrispyTuner
NewTone

My Thoughts​I think *Melodyne* produces the most "realistic"/natural results out of these four plugins, but it sounds somewhat muffled. I think some of the dynamics have been lost here, and while it does sound the most human, I think it also degrades the quality of the recording a lot.

In terms of usage outside of this benchmark, I found that the interface does a great job of grouping notes together in the way I would expect as a producer, meaning that there weren't any tiny sub-notes disconnected from the main singing. Melodyne does some sibilance detection and handles sibilant sounds differently when correcting the pitch, which I think helps make it sound more natural. I think those two aspects of it are very valuable, and make it stand out. It also offers a volume levelling feature to make quiet notes louder and vice versa, which none of the others have. However, in practice, I got terrible results with that feature. Melodyne lacks any sort of synthetic vibrato, which I feel is a shame for a plugin that costs this much. Even though many would say that synthetic vibrato is a gimmick, Waves and CrispyTuner both give you that feature at far lower prices.

*Waves Tune* produces a very sharp sounding result with very crisp tones, but it has a huge artifact towards the end of the sample. It's worth keeping in mind that all of these plugins received the exact same input, but this was the only one that had such a huge issue. For that reason alone, I think it's hard to recommend this in terms of quality, but it definitely can be seen as the "budget" option considering it goes on sale for around $30 and has features comparable to the others.

Outside of the benchmark, I have a few other complaints here. The interface is straight out of the '90s, and it just looks like a dinosaur of a plugin compared to the others. The note detection struggles and often splits up a note into 3 notes, with one tiny little out of tune one in the middle. With those complaints out of the way though, it's really packed with features. It can handle natural vibrato, synthetic vibrato, and even allows you to draw the pitch directly into any shape you want (no other tested plugins allows this). That allows a lot of creativity in my opinion. One tiny feature of Waves that I love is that the piano roll can play a reference note for you (for instance, playing a reference C3 note). This helps a lot when you're moving vocals between notes rather than quantizing them.

It's almost unfair to include *CrispyTuner *here because of a quirk compared to the others. In this plugin, the pitch curve gets mapped to a series of quantized "target notes" during the recording (at least in the graphical mode). That means that when you transpose the notes, you're transposing the quantized notes instead of the pitches that the singer actually hit. And when it's time to correct, it simply snaps the pitch curve to those target notes, which means that this one has more of an "auto tune" sound versus the other ones, which are just directly transposing the vocals. I thought about removing this, but I think it's fair to include because it's a direct competitor to the others, and because this seems like a limitation that should be noted.

It's worth noting that CrispyTuner is a new plugin, so this could easily be fixed in the future. And of the plugins here, this one is actually under active development (along with Melodyne but that one's pace is far slower), which makes me think that it might soon surpass a lot of the others. The interface is good and it has the advantage of being capable of live tuning as well, which is unique among these. I like the "slide" feature of this one, which lets you slide from one note to another smoothly, and the fact that it includes nice extras like synthetic vibrato. I'd love to see ARA support instead of depending on ReWire, which is already deprecated and being removed from DAWs like FL Studio. And I think the note detection could be massively improved. This plugin does let you customize the note detection parameters, but it seems to detect notes only through forwards playback (like Waves) rather than analyzing the whole piece like Melodyne and NewTone. The result is that there are a lot of tiny mistaken notes. As a very minor thing, it would also be great to copy the ability to "draw" a pitch like Waves does, but that's much less important than the aforementioned issues. So again, I think there's a lot of potential here, but also a huge room for improvement. I wouldn't use this personally until some of the above is fixed. One quick thing to mention: there's no way this plugin is worth its $400 MSRP, but I see it going on sale for $50 often so it's a worth budget contender at that price point.

*NewTone *keeps the sharpness of the original, but has a more robotic sound to it than others. There are a few places where you can hear the tuning come in a bit heavy handed, and I think the clarity isn't worth it in this case.

It's worth noting that NewTone is especially buggy. It crashed twice during my testing, and several times it turned the clip into a guttural growling noise. It took me several attempts to get this to produce a proper result. I think that the interface is actually the best out of all of these, with the knobs that control centering/variation/transition time being very intuitive and more convenient than Melodyne's "macros". The note detection is quite good as well. The results are what I would consider the second best, after Melodyne. However, it was so unstable that I would never depend on it for professional work. Quick note for those unaware: this plugin only works inside of FL Studio, because they don't sell a VST version.

Conclusion​I feel that all of these have some downsides. But personally, I feel that Melodyne performed best in this benchmark. I haven't tested Logic's Flex Pitch, Cubase's VariAudio, AutoTune Pro, or Revoice Pro, but I would love to get my hands on those to try them at a later date. If anyone else wants to add their own experiences, or try this out in the plugins that I didn't try myself, please leave your opinion as well.


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## Artemi (Jul 11, 2021)

I really appreciate this overview, as far as I remember with my own tests you can get good results with melodyne if you know how to work with it, it has a specific workflow.


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## chlady (Jul 11, 2021)

I use melodyne sometimes and get good results and have autotune as well for a few occasions Although a lot of the the time I still use my Daw's pitch correction in DP10 which is quick and fast and has very good algorhythms without artifacts.


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## José Herring (Jul 11, 2021)

In my experience Melodyne and the ones included in most DAWS tend to work the best. I use to take vocal phrases and make them original phrases using Meldoyne and Cubase a lot. 

No interest in any other type of pitch correction.


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## Jay Panikkar (Jul 11, 2021)

Imo, Melodyne produced the most natural output in your benchmark. I think the muffling is inevitable because of the way Melodyne works and the range of your pitch-shifting. But you should be able to reverse this, add energy back into the vocals using either a post-EQ or an exciter.


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## SteveC (Jul 12, 2021)

Which version of Melodyne did you use? Maybe the formant shifter could help!


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## Maarten (Jul 12, 2021)

Thanks for your tests! And it confirmed my experiences also, Melodyne is the most natural.


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## QuiteAlright (Jul 12, 2021)

SteveC said:


> Which version of Melodyne did you use? Maybe the formant shifter could help!


I used Melodyne 5, and didn't manually edit any formants (but to be fair, I didn't manually edit formants in any of those other plugins either). You're probably right that manual tweaking here could improve the high end from Melodyne.


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## chimuelo (Jul 12, 2021)

Above mentioned software works well, and for hardware the 2 options I like to use are excellent for real time live work where vocals or even interesting artifacts on instruments can be used.

The EHX-256 is MIDI controlled presets and Vocoding or Pitch Correction, and the all in one Vocal processor the TC VoiceRack with programmable microphone that has exceptional harmonizing, pitch correction and standard FX.

The Cher/Hip-Hop quality is actually the easiest form of Pitch Correction/auto tune and unfortunately still popular. I actually prefer using PC on drifting vocalists that get tired after the first of two 90 minute sets. Zero artifacts on either of these units, but using combinations of both in an automated chain of effects gets the job done. Especially when a LoFi quality needs to be kicked in for 4 bars, etc.


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## AudioLoco (Jul 12, 2021)

Pity you didn't include the main benchmark Antares AutoTune.....


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## QuiteAlright (Jul 12, 2021)

AudioLoco said:


> Pity you didn't include the main benchmark Antares AutoTune.....


Yeah, it's a big omission but I don't have a copy of AutoTune Pro (I do have Access but it's not really comparable to the above). Have you had better results with that one?


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## VSriHarsha (Jul 15, 2021)

chlady said:


> I use melodyne sometimes and get good results and have autotune as well for a few occasions Although a lot of the the time I still use my Daw's pitch correction in DP10 which is quick and fast and has very good algorhythms without artifacts.


I find Autotune a little artificial. Pitch correction is done, but I like to feel it’s natural but it won’t just sound like that. Well, I don’t know anything about Melodyne but (searching yet)I would like to get a good piece of software that is productive.


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## Pete333 (Dec 29, 2022)

@QuiteAlright thanks a lot for all your work on this. I have these excl. NewTone so I am very happy for your, such a valuable, sharing of experience and knowledge. Can you pls estimate how long you have been already using those plugins in the time of that review? Or describe your experience level with each of those in that time? Did you do any further parameter, other than the pitch, tuning in each plugin when doing the review pls? Thanks for additional info on this and again for such a detailed work, Pete (excuse my English pls, I am not a natural speaker)


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## QuiteAlright (Dec 29, 2022)

Pete333 said:


> @QuiteAlright thanks a lot for all your work on this. I have these excl. NewTone so I am very happy for your, such a valuable, sharing of experience and knowledge. Can you pls estimate how long you have been already using those plugins in the time of that review? Or describe your experience level with each of those in that time? Did you do any further parameter, other than the pitch, tuning in each plugin when doing the review pls? Thanks for additional info on this and again for such a detailed work, Pete (excuse my English pls, I am not a natural speaker)


You're very welcome Pete! When I write this, I had already used Melodyne for several years. However, I had not used any of the others for a long time. So for those, I had to learn the user interfaces and controls first.

I did not change parameters like note timing or formants. For those, I left whatever the plugin automatically set. But I think I did fix notes where it detected the wrong pitch initially (my memory here is not perfect because it's been more than a year since I wrote the original post). Meaning that if the plugin couldn't detect the correct pitch _before _correction, I fixed it.


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