Graillon 3 Free Edition Explained: Every Control, Hard Tune to Natural, and a Settings Chart by Job

The short answer: Graillon 3 is Auburn Sounds' pitch correction plugin and voice changer, and its Free Edition does the whole tuning job: hard tune and natural correction, a pitch shifter (12 semitones either way), formant shifting, three pitch engines, MIDI input, and one-knob vocal effects (compressor, gate, chorus, preamp, bitcrusher). The paid Full Edition adds three things: Pitch-Tracking Modulation, keyboard tuning for non-standard tunings, and a vocal doubler. For the hard-tune sound, set the scale, turn Correction Amount to 100% and Smooth to minimum. For natural correction, Auburn lists four moves: raise Smooth, raise Snap Min (which lets vibrato live), lower Snap Max, or lower Correction Amount. In Graillon, a lower Smooth is faster. The Free Edition is a direct download with no account, for Windows, macOS (native on Apple silicon) and Linux, in VST3, VST2, AU, AAX, CLAP and LV2, so it loads in every major DAW.

I tune the vocals on my own releases (50M+ streams through Sony, Universal, Ultra, Dim Mak), across both lanes: obvious hard tune and correction nobody hears. Graillon 3 is the free all-rounder in the best autotune plugins, and this is the control-by-control version. No affiliate links on this page. I sell a vocal chain, disclosed at the end, and it doesn't include a tuner.

What Graillon 3 is

Auburn Sounds built Graillon in stages. Graillon 1 (2015) was a Pitch-Tracking Modulation effect. Graillon 2 (2017) added pitch correction, pitch shifting and a bitcrusher, and became a popular free tuner for seven years. Graillon 3 (2024) brought in the pitch engine from Auburn's Inner Pitch, formant shifting and a set of vocal effects. At the time of writing it's at version 3.2.

• Free Edition, Full Edition. The Free Edition is a zip on auburnsounds.com. The Full Edition upgrade is sold through itch.io ($29 on Auburn's page when I checked); you install it on top of the free one, and Auburn says your free-edition sessions keep working.
• Formats. Auburn's manual lists CLAP, VST3, VST2, Audio Unit, AAX, LV2 and FL Studio's own plugin format. On Linux it's LV2, CLAP and VST3 (VST2 was dropped there in 3.1).
• Systems. Windows 7 or newer, macOS 10.15 or newer, Ubuntu 22.04 or newer. Native Apple silicon support arrived in 2.5, and native AAX on Apple silicon in 2.7, so there's no Rosetta step for Pro Tools.
• Graillon 2 is inside. The G2 engine keeps the Graillon 2 sound, and because your DAW sees each major version as a separate plugin, old Graillon 2 sessions don't break when you install 3.

Free vs Full: what you actually get

Auburn's product page and manual mark only those last three as Full Edition features. For tuning a vocal, the Free Edition isn't a demo; nothing about the correction itself is held back.

Every control in the Free Edition

Control names and behavior are from Auburn's Graillon 3 User's Guide (3.2.0) and its one-page cheat sheet. Auburn publishes ranges for Pitch Shift, Formant Shift and the percentage controls; Smooth, Snap Min and Snap Max show their values on screen (milliseconds and semitones) but have no published ranges.

The waveform display in the middle shows the signal, the detected pitch and gain reduction, and you can click notes in it to switch them on or off.

Smooth, Snap and Inertia: the controls that set the sound

Smooth is how fast. It sets how quickly Graillon moves to the new note. Lower is faster, and minimum is the hard-tune sound. That's the opposite direction from MAutoPitch, where a higher Speed is faster, and the same direction as AutoTune's Retune Speed and Logic's Response, where lower is faster. The best autotune plugins has the direction for every major tuner in one table.

Correction Amount is how much, but Auburn says it's most useful at 0 or 100%. In Graillon, the natural sound mostly comes from the Snap controls and Smooth, not from turning the amount down.

Snap Min is the vibrato control. It's a tolerance: pitch that wanders less than Snap Min away from the target is left alone, so vibrato and small drifts survive. Snap Max is the other end, how far away a note can be and still get pulled. Narrow the window and only notes that are close get corrected.

Inertia is stickiness. It favors the note Graillon already chose, which stops a wobbly note flipping between two targets. Too much and it can hold a note the singer meant to leave.

Auburn's own list of four ways to make correction less obvious: decrease Correction Amount, increase Smooth, increase Snap Min, decrease Snap Max. Their natural-correction demo uses Snap Min, Snap Max, the Inner Pitch engine, Smooth and Amount together.

Set the scale first

Most "bad autotune" is a wrong key. A tuner pulls every note to the nearest allowed target, so a wrong scale pulls notes to wrong targets.

1. Find the song's key from the instrumental.
2. Click the treble clef and pick major or minor.
3. Rotate it to your key with Shift-click on the keyboard or the arrows in the waveform view, then check that the highlighted notes match the key.
4. Add any notes the melody uses outside the key by clicking them, so they don't get dragged to a neighbor.

How to tune vocals covers the key, retune speed as a genre decision, and when real-time tuning isn't enough.

Graillon 3 settings chart, by job

Free Edition only. Auburn publishes no ranges for Smooth or the Snap controls, so those are directions, not numbers; set them by ear on held notes and slides.

Hard-tuned leads mostly live in rap and melodic rap mixes, and the rap vocal chain has the stages that come after the tuner, from two-stage compression to slaps instead of big reverbs.

Playing the melody in with MIDI

When the melody leaves the key or the singer's notes are ambiguous, you can tell Graillon the targets directly. Route a MIDI track to Graillon (the routing depends on your DAW), make sure the MIDI option is on, then play or draw the melody. Auburn notes the switch does nothing if no MIDI reaches the plugin, so if notes aren't snapping where you play them, check the routing first.

How to set it up

1. Download the Free Edition from auburnsounds.com and run the installer (.pkg on Mac, .exe on Windows; on Linux, copy the LV2, CLAP or VST3 file into its folder). Auburn notes Logic may need a manual scan in its Plug-in Manager.
2. Comp and edit the takes first. Tuning a take you'll replace is wasted work.
3. Put Graillon first in the vocal chain, on the dry, comped lead. Reverb and compression in front of a tuner confuse the pitch detection.
4. Set the scale with the steps above.
5. Pick the engine and the correction settings from the chart row for the job.
6. Pull Dry all the way down and leave Wet up on a lead. A tuned and an untuned voice a few cents apart smear.
7. Leave Comp, Gate, Preamp and Chorus off if your own chain follows, so you don't compress twice.
8. Compare with bypass at the same level on the hardest parts: held notes, slides, the quietest words. Then in the full mix.
9. Build the rest of the chain after it. What a vocal chain is has the order.

Mistakes that make it sound cheap

• The wrong scale. The single biggest cause of glitchy tuning.
• A middle Smooth that commits to nothing. Audible enough to notice, too timid to be a sound. Go hard or go natural.
• Snap Min up on a robotic vocal. Auburn's own warning: it lets pitch drift through, which fights the effect.
• The Dry fader up on a lead. The tuned and untuned voices phase against each other.
• Compressing twice. Graillon's Comp and Preamp plus your chain's compressors stack up fast.
• I2 on every track. It's the most natural shifter and the heaviest on CPU. Use it where you shift pitch, not where you only tune.
• Expecting it to fix one bad note. A real-time tuner treats the whole performance the same way; one sour word is a note editor's job, and AutoTune vs Melodyne covers the split.

Graillon 3 vs MAutoPitch vs your stock tuner

The stock tuners are Logic's Pitch Correction, Ableton's Auto Shift (Live 12.1 and later) and FL Studio's Pitcher (Signature Bundle and up); Pro Tools ships note editors rather than a real-time tuner. The MAutoPitch guide has the other free pick control by control.

Where I land (and the disclosure)

If your DAW ships a tuner, start there. If it doesn't (FL Studio's Fruity and Producer editions, Pro Tools, Ableton before Live 12.1), Graillon 3 Free Edition is the most complete free tuner: both lanes of tuning, MIDI input, pitch and formant tricks, and it runs everywhere, Linux included. Set the scale, commit to a lane, and keep the Dry fader down.

Tuning is step one, and here the step is Graillon itself. The Ultimate Vocal Chain is everything after it: my vocal chain in one Waves StudioVerse file, 15 Waves plugins in a serial core plus a parallel split, with 8 macros (Low Cut, Glue, Air, Reverb, Delay, Slap, FX, Widener). With the macros where they start, it gives you Scheps 73 preamp warmth, parallel compression, the top-end shine of CLA Vocals, de-essing and multiband control. It doesn't tune; tune first. Its FX macro adds a layer an octave above the vocal, which is pitch shifting for size, not correction. It runs in any DAW that runs Waves plugins, with the free StudioVerse and the 15 Waves plugins listed on its page, and the product page has a loudness-matched before/after player, so you can hear it on a real vocal before you buy. I'm biased; Graillon followed by any chain in the right order does the job.

Quick answers

Is Graillon 3 free? The Free Edition is, as a direct download from auburnsounds.com with no account: pitch correction, pitch and formant shifting, three pitch engines, MIDI input and the vocal effects. The paid Full Edition adds Pitch-Tracking Modulation, keyboard tuning and a vocal doubler.

What's the difference between Graillon 3 Free and Full? Three features: Pitch-Tracking Modulation (ring and frequency-shift voices that follow the pitch), keyboard tuning with a tuning knob for each of the 12 notes, and a vocal doubler. Everything used for tuning is in the free one.

How do you get the hard autotune effect in Graillon 3? Set the scale to the song's key, turn Correction on with Amount at 100%, Smooth and Snap Min at minimum, and pull the Dry fader down. If it warbles, a note the melody uses isn't enabled.

Does Graillon 3 work in FL Studio, Logic and Pro Tools? Yes. It loads as VST3 in FL Studio (Auburn also ships FL's own plugin format), as AU in Logic and as AAX in Pro Tools, natively on Apple silicon. It also runs on Linux in LV2, CLAP and VST3.