The rise of samplers during the 1980s offered yet another pitch correction solution. But compared to the Harmonizer, the Infernal Machine is incredibly rare and expensive.
It was a highly capable and cutting edge machine for its time, allowing users to change pitch without affecting the time signature. In addition to its pitch shifting/harmonizing capabilities, the Infernal Machine could apply delay and reverb to sounds put through it, as well as reverse and loop samples. In the early 1980s, the French musical instrument company Publison released the Infernal Machine 90, an early hybrid digital signal processor and sampler. Engineers still had to do overdubs on specific parts of vocal tracks to bring them back into pitch. Over the years, Eventide made improvements on the Harmonizer’s pitch correction in different models, but it remained a far cry from Auto-Tune. Thus, by today’s standards, its pitch corrections capabilities were extremely limited. The H910 allowed users to make modest pitch corrections, though digital artifacts emerged when the original pitch was too radically altered. But it was very far from something like the Auto-Tune plug-in. Introduced in 1975, the H910 was an early type of pitch correction device. Digital vocal tuning arrivesĮventide, a well-known manufacturer of effects units, originally made its mark with the Harmonizer H910, the world’s first digital effects unit. By speeding up the slower of the two tracks, Emerick was able to match the tempo and pitch. The Beatles had recorded these two takes at slightly different tempos and pitches. One of the most famous examples of varispeed pitch correction is the recording of The Beatles 1967 single “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The song as we know it is not one single take, but two takes (7 and 26) spliced together by producer George Martin and his innovative engineer Geoff Emerick. Another method of varispeed pitch correction was to slow a tape machine down, re-record a new part at a lower pitch, and then bring the recording back up to its original speed.
By slowing down or speeding up a part of a recording and splicing with the tape containing the majority of the song, engineers could alter pitch. This process became more popular in recording studios during the 1950s and 1960s. Variable tape speedīy the 1940s, studio engineers could produce primitive pitch correction by tweaking a reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders varispeed. But like most anything in the 20th century, the technological solutions for off-pitch vocals were waiting to be discovered. John Lennon, famously insecure about his own voice, had engineer Geoff Emerick run his vocals through a gerry-rigged Leslie organ speaker to create a vibrato effect for “Tomorrow Never Knows.”īeyond these effects, if a vocalist couldn’t sing on pitch throughout a recording, it was difficult to mask, and required more drastic measure. Later, in the 1960s, singers could multitrack their vocals and apply other effects like tremolo (Tommy James on “ Crimson & Clover”). In the 1950s, capable vocalists could get by with a little spring reverb and maybe some slap back echo.
Even with the mid-20th century’s recording studio wizards, if you were a vocalist who sang off pitch, solutions were time-consuming, difficult, and not always ideal.