Akai Professional PitchRight

Akai's PitchRight plug-in is one that is designed for tuning vocals and instruments. I used to use this plug-in on my old system before I got Melodyne and Auto Tune. I don't remember too much about installing the plug-in, but I remember that right off the bat I found the plug-in easy to use. Everything is really easy to understand, which was good as this was one of the first tuning plug-ins that I'd ever used. The interface gives you control over a variety of different parameters, including the ability to choose which pitches in the chromatic scale you'd like to tune to. It also gives you parameters for setting the scale, key, ratio, smoothing, and calibration in terms of Hz. You can also use MIDI with the plug-in if you so choose, but I have never used it in this capacity. The plug-in is almost fool proof, so I wouldn't think you'd need a manual for this one.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I don't have the Akai PitchRight plug-in any more, but when I was running it it was in Cubase SX 2 and later in 3. I had a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv8000 lap top with a 3.0 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM. This system was enough for me to run this plug-in comfortably for the most part, although most of the time when I used it I was just processing notes here and there rather than running it as a plug-in. In hindsight this isn't the best way to do it as it doesn't leave you with options, but at least I didn't have to worry about performance problems...

OVERALL OPINION

The Akai PitchRight plug-in is surprisingly a really good one for what it is. I don't know how it would compare to modern version of Auto Tune and Melodyne (probably not favorably), but when I was using this a number of years ago it was my go to pitch correcting plug-in. I found that it was very smooth, often smoother than Auto Tune when I later got it. For a while I was using this to correct individual notes and using Auto Tune for sections. I can't say that I miss using this plug-in as the versions of Melodyne and Auto Tune that I have now are more than adequate. However, if you need a pitch correcting plug-in on the super cheap, know that Akai PitchRight is an underrated option worth checking out.