Antares ATR1a Hardware user manual

							©2000 Antares Audio Technologies. All Rights Reserved.
Antares Audio Technologies
231 Technology Circle, Scotts Valley, California 95066 USA
voice: (831) 461 7800
fax: (831) 461 7801
service: (831) 461 7814
web: www.antarestech.com
Printed in USA Rev 1.0-10/00 
						

							Contents
Getting Started
Welcome 5
Tech Support 6
A few words from Dr. Andy 7
Introducing the ATR-1a Chapter 1
Background 9
So what exactly is it? 9
A little bit about pitch 10
Some pitch terminology 10
How the ATR-1a determines pitch 11
How the ATR-1a corrects pitch 12
Program Mode vs. Song Mode 13
Setting Up the ATR-1a Chapter 2
Setting up the ATR-1a 15
Panel Controls and Chapter 3
Front panel 17
Back panel 19
Display Screens and Chapter 4
Flash screen 20
Mode pages 20
Program Edit pages 22
Speed page 23
Make Scale from MIDI page 24
Scale page 24
Vibrato page 26
Connectors
Menu Pages 
						

							Program Name page 27
Save Program page 27
Song Edit pages 27
Song Speed page 28
Song Items page 28
Song Vibrato page 29
Song Name page 30
Save Song page 30
System Edit pages 30
Bass Mode page 31
Sensitivity and LCD page 31
Foot Switch and Detune page 32
MIDI page 1 33
MIDI page 2 34
MIDI page 3 35
MIDI page 4 35
MIDI page 5 36
Owner Message page 36
Creative Applications Chapter 5 37
Appendix
Factory Programs 40
Scale and Chord Guides 41
MIDI SysEx message formats 44
MIDI SysEx message examples 47
MIDI Implementation Chart 50
ATR-1a Specifications 51
Index 52 
						

							5
Welcome!
On behalf of everyone at Antares Audio Technologies, we’d like to offer
both our thanks and congratulations on your decision to purchase the
absolute best intonation correction hardware in the world.
Before you proceed much farther, we’d like to strongly encourage you to
fill out and return the ATR-1a registration card. As an ATR-1a owner, you
are entitled to receive notification of any firmware upgrades, technical
support, and advance announcements of upcoming products. But we
can’t send you stuff unless we know who and where you are. So please,
send it in.
At Antares, we are committed to excellence in quality, customer service,
and technological innovation. With your purchase of the ATR-1a, you
have created a relationship with Antares which we hope will be long
and gratifying. Let us know what you think. You can count on us to
listen to you.
Again, thanks.
The Whole Antares Crew 
						

							6
Technical Support
In the unlikely event that you experience a problem using your ATR-1a,
try the following:
1. Make another quick scan through this manual. Who knows? You may
have stumbled onto some feature that you didn’t notice the first time
through.
2. Check our web page for tips, techniques, or any late-breaking
information: www.antarestech.com
3. Call your local Antares dealer.
4. Call us at (831) 461-7814 Monday through Friday between 9am and
5pm USA Pacific Standard Time.
5. Email us at: [email protected]
For options 3, 4 and 5, please be prepared to provide the serial number of
your ATR-1a. 
						

							7
A few words from Dr. Andy
I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting in my junior high school band,
happily playing away on my flute, when I noticed that our conductor was
screaming and jumping up and down on the podium. What was this
about? Suddenly, I realized she was screaming at me. And just in time too
— since I was able to duck and watch a baton fly past my head, missing
me by inches. “Why [expletive] can’t you play in tune?” she asked. But I
was in tune. Everybody else was out of tune. It was then I began to learn
about intonation.
Many artists struggle with intonation. An entire concert can be spoiled by
a single sour note. Many of our most celebrated entertainers spend hours
in the studio doing retake after retake, trying to sing expressively and in
tune. Afterwards, their producers spend yet more time trying to correct
intonation problems using inadequate tools.
The ATR-1a is dramatically changing all of that. Because of the ATR-1a,
sessions can focus on feeling and expression, rather than retakes. Studio
hours are reduced and production costs are lowered. Even artists in live
performance situations can concentrate on interpretation, confident that
any pitch inaccuracies will be caught and corrected before they make it
out to the audience.
What’s more, the ATR-1a is incredibly easy to use (a fact attested to by the
thinness of this manual). So fire up your ATR-1a, invest a half hour or so in
reading the following pages, and prepare to make intonation problems a
thing of the past.
Andy Hildebrand Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Scientist
[email protected] 
						

							8 
						

							9
Chapter 1:
Introducing the ATR-1a
Some background
In 1997, Antares first introduced the ground-breaking Auto-Tune Pitch
Correcting Plug-In for ProTools™ (followed a bit later by the VST and
stand-alone versions). Here was a tool that actually corrected the pitch
of vocals and other solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or
artifacts, while preserving all of the expressive nuance of the original
performance. Recording Magazine called Auto-Tune a “Holy Grail of
recording.” And went on to say, “Bottom line, Auto-Tune is amazing...
Everyone with a Mac should have this program.” In fact, we know of
quite a few people who bought kilo-buck ProTools systems just to be
able to run Auto-Tune.
While Auto-Tune has met with tremendous success, we were immediately
barraged with requests for a self-contained “Auto-Tune-in-a-box.” The
result is the ATR-1a which you have presumably just purchased.
So what exactly is it?
The ATR-1a is a rack-mountable hardware implementation of Antares’s
Auto-Tune pitch correcting software. Like Auto-Tune, the ATR-1a employs
state-of-the-art digital signal processing algorithms (many, interestingly
enough, drawn from the geophysical industry) to continuously detect the
pitch of a periodic input signal (typically a solo voice or instrument) and
instantly and seamlessly change it to a desired pitch (defined by any of a
number of user-programmable scales).
In addition, the ATR-1a, befitting its easy portability, includes a number
of new features that make it particularly powerful in live performance
situations. These include a new Song Mode that lets the ATR-1a follow
even the most complex harmonic song structures, foot switch control of
Scale selection and Bypass Mode, as well as MIDI control of every ATR-1a
parameter. 
						

							10
A little bit about pitch
Pitch is typically associated with our perception of the “highness” or
“lowness” of a particular sound. Our perception of pitch ranges from the
very general (the high pitch of hissing steam, the low pitch of the rumble
of an earthquake) to the very specific (the exact pitch of a solo singer or
violinist). There is, of course, a wide range of variation in the middle. A
symphony orchestra playing a scale in unison, for example, results in an
extremely complex waveform, yet you are still able to easily sense the
pitch.
The vocalists and the solo instruments that the ATR-1a is designed to
process have a very clearly defined quality of pitch. The sound-generating
mechanism of these sources is a vibrating element (vocal chords, a string,
an air column, etc.). The sound that is thus generated can be graphically
represented as a waveform (a graph of the sound’s pressure over time)
that is periodic. This means that each cycle of waveform repeats itself
fairly exactly, as in the periodic waveform shown in the diagram below:
Because of its periodic nature, this sound’s pitch can be easily identified
and processed by the ATR-1a.
Other sounds are more complex. This waveform:
is of a violin section playing a single tone. Our ears still sense a specific
pitch, but the waveform does not repeat itself. This waveform is a summa-
tion of a number of individually periodic violins. The summation is non-
periodic because the individual violins are slightly out of tune with respect
to one another. Because of this lack of periodicity, the ATR-1a would not
be able to process this sound.
Some pitch terminology
The pitch of a periodic waveform is defined as the number of times the
periodic element repeats in one second. This is measured in Hertz (abbre-
viated Hz.). For example, the pitch of A3 (the A above middle C on a
piano) is traditionally 440Hz (although that standard varies by a few Hz.
in various parts of the world).