?! autotune is a tuner...it has nothing on vocoding since that process doesnt modulate any filters or synthesize anything of its carrier signal. The autotune effect comes up due to anomalies that arise on extreme setting in autotune. The pitch shifting algorhytmn used by antares gives the typical yet friggin annoying effect we call autotune but its purpose is NOT that effect. Its usage should smoothly pitch any signal without hearing those artifacts in the processed signal.
Pretty much all pitch shifting, timestretching or warping engine has these artifacts pop up on extreme settings. Aside from antares (which i obviously dont use) i find logic to have a very nice algorhytmn that allowes for higher % pitchshifting before hearing unwanted artifacts (nice for altering tempo on vinylbreaks
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The gating is obvious by now, but i hardly use it for hiphop unless, for some reason, i use a lot of synth drums. For techno its a common tool to use on the drumbus, just to save a bit of headroom and tighten the percussion bits. Another common used example is letting the kick duck a bassline on the key input.
Anyway, a good gate is a fast one and im still rocking my ds-201's every now and then. The dbx166xl imo is also nice if on a budget...yeah and aside from software