

Waves Tune produces a very sharp sounding result with very crisp tones, but it has a huge artifact towards the end of the sample. Even though many would say that synthetic vibrato is a gimmick, Waves and CrispyTuner both give you that feature at far lower prices. Melodyne lacks any sort of synthetic vibrato, which I feel is a shame for a plugin that costs this much. However, in practice, I got terrible results with that feature. It also offers a volume levelling feature to make quiet notes louder and vice versa, which none of the others have.


I think those two aspects of it are very valuable, and make it stand out. Melodyne does some sibilance detection and handles sibilant sounds differently when correcting the pitch, which I think helps make it sound more natural. 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. 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. My ThoughtsI think Melodyne produces the most "realistic"/natural results out of these four plugins, but it sounds somewhat muffled. I'll add my own thoughts, as well as some clarification, below. ResultsPlease hear for yourself how each plugin did with this. 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.

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. I picked a vocal sample which was already in tune, from an Alicia Keys song, and pitched it 5 semitones up. So in order to test them in a way that would expose some weaknesses, I put them through a stress test. MethodologyTuning out of pitch vocals is the most common use case for these plugins, but largely, they sound very similar when making minor adjustments. I posted this first on KVR and Reddit, but wanted to share here as well. So I tested several of them out, and I want to share the results for anyone else who's interested here. Hello all! I was wondering how similar current pitch correction plugins are to each other, and which ones have the highest quality.
