Free autotune online

What autotune does

Autotune listens to the pitch of a voice many times a second, finds the nearest note of the key you chose and moves the voice to it. A little correction makes a singer sound confident and in tune. A fast, full correction makes the jump between notes instant, and that is the robotic sound of so much pop, hip hop and trap.

Ours is the pitch correction of BRAVO, the OBRA studio, brought to the web. A detector (YIN) reads the pitch of each cycle of your voice. A small musical brain decides the note: it holds a note through vibrato instead of flipping between two, it ignores breaths and consonants, and it lets a real jump through. A pitch-synchronous shifter (TD-PSOLA) then re-spaces the cycles of your voice to the new pitch without resampling them, so your tone and your formants stay yours.

How to get the hard tune effect

Pick Hard tune. It sets the retune speed to instant, humanize to zero and the full amount, so every note snaps the moment you reach it and sustained notes come out perfectly flat. Then set the key of your song: with the right key and scale the voice jumps between the notes of the song, and that staircase is the effect.

Sing a little legato and slide between notes: the slides are what turn into those quick steps. Trap uses the same instant snap with a rawer, more digital grain. If the effect sounds wrong, the key is almost always the reason: try Auto, or the chromatic scale, which snaps to every semitone and always fits.

How to tune a vocal for a song

Use a solo vocal: the dry take of your recording, or a vocal stem. A full song has guitars, keys and bass under the voice, and the detector needs one clear pitch to follow. If all you have is the finished song, extract the vocal first with our acapella extractor, tune it here, and put it back over the instrumental.

Drop the vocal and check the key we found against the key of your beat. Start with Natural or Pop, press play and switch between Original and Tuned. Watch the pitch view: the thin line is what you sang, the bright line is what you hear. If a note goes to the wrong place, the key or the scale is off. Add the beat below to judge it in context, then download the tuned vocal, or the mix.

Live or file: which one

Live is for fun, for practice and for recording a take with the effect in your ears. The tuner needs to hear a few cycles of your voice before it can shift them, so you hear yourself about 45 to 60 milliseconds late, plus the delay of your device. Headphones are a must: with speakers the mic hears the tuned voice again and it feeds back.

File is for the take you will keep. It plays through the same engine, so you hear every setting change at once, and the download is rendered offline from the whole file with nothing dropped. A live take opens in the file view when you stop, so you can tune it again with other settings and download both the dry and the tuned take.

Key and scale, explained

The key is the home note of the song, the scale is the set of notes it uses. C major uses the white keys of a piano; A minor uses the same notes from another home. Autotune only snaps to the notes of the scale you pick, so a voice that drifts between two notes lands on the one that belongs in the song.

Auto finds the key from the melody you sang, using the key finder of our BPM and key tool. Chromatic uses all twelve notes: it never puts you on a wrong note, but it corrects less musically. Minor pentatonic and blues have fewer notes, so the snapping is bolder, which suits a lot of rap and trap hooks.

Settings for popular styles

Pop: retune speed around 50 (about 15 milliseconds), humanize low, full amount. Clean and tight, still a voice. R&B: Natural, or a speed near 75 with humanize around 30, so runs and vibrato breathe and only the long notes are pulled in. Trap and hard tune: speed at zero, humanize at zero, full amount, the right key. Ballads and acoustic: Natural, and lower the mix if you still hear the effect.

Retune speed is the time the voice takes to reach the note: from instant to about 140 milliseconds. Humanize leaves small drifts and vibrato alone and lets go of a note when you are clearly moving to the next one. Mix blends the original back in.

Recording tips for a better tune

Record dry: no reverb, no delay, no doubling. Effects smear the pitch and the detector hears several notes at once. Keep the vocal alone, a little away from the mic, at a healthy level with no clipping. A quiet room helps more than an expensive mic.

Sing in the key of the beat and close to the notes: autotune polishes, it does not write the melody for you. Put the tuner before reverb and delay in your chain, never after. For the hard effect, sing confidently and keep the vowels long.

Learn more, or get a person on it

Read the mastering guides, comparisons and data, or send your tracks to an engineer with OBRA ULTRA.