Tech reviews: Antares Auto-Tune Access 10

For this review I will be looking at the current entry-level version of Antares Auto-Tune, labelled ‘Access 10’. If you don't think you know this software, I'm sure as soon as I mention the song Believe, by Cher, your mind will conjure up the chorus, where the lead vocal almost robotically glitches and snaps to notes in a highly distinctive manner; so distinctive, in fact, that the sound is often referred to as the ‘Cher effect’. Although this wasn't the first use of auto-tune in pop music, it is undeniably the most well-known, and it was adopted by many artists and producers at the time. Originally, the effect was designed to fix out-of-tune singing in an imperceivable way: not giving the singer's note a chance to stabilise before locking it into a specified key. This type of auto-tune has caused controversy over the years, labelled as cheating and fooling listeners into ‘believing’ an artist is better than they are.