Tuning algorithms do this on a speed control, ie if you start on key and GO flat, because you suck (bad) OR youre Bonnie Raitt (brilliant) it will leave the beginning where it is and alter the end to maintain pitch. The big difference is that with the sampler, you would be sampling the whole note, raising it some cents to be more in tune. Comping is still how all vocals are done that aren't live off the floor with the band, IME. I've also read about New Kids On The Block having used 'computer enhanced' vocals at a number of live shows in 1989, and don't quite know what this meant, since as far as I know, real time pitch correction was practically impossible before the release of Auto Tune.ДЄctually you can change the pitch on the sampler before its flow back. It's sung by David Barbe, who had quite a weak singing voice on live recordings and on his Mercyland album, but sounds in tune and quite robotic on this song. I know that Auto Tune greatly popularised vocal pitch correction and made it a lot easier to do, however I'm wondering if there were any studio tracks you can think of which made use of (probably manually programmed rather than automated) pre-Auto Tune vocal pitch correction? I'm excluding vocoders that were used soley for a robotic effect and songs consisting of many different vocal takes to get a finished product that sounded as good as possible (this was definitely commonplace pre-Auto Tune.ДЄuto-Tune was released in September 1997, and one example of a song predating this date that sounds like it uses some form of pre-Auto Tune pitch correction would be Sugar's Company Book from 1994.

What is pitch correction