What Autotune Does 2hollis Use: His Secret Weapon for Robotic Vocals

The artist Hollis, often stylized as 2hollis in his branding, has carved a distinct niche in modern alternative and hyperpop-influenced music with a vocal sound that is immediately recognizable. His signature style relies heavily on aggressive, creative pitch processing, moving far beyond subtle correction. The primary tool he employs is Antares Auto-Tune, specifically the professional-grade Auto-Tune Pro plugin, which serves as the foundational processor for his characteristic robotic and elastic vocal tones.

Within Auto-Tune Pro, Hollis typically utilizes the “Flex-Tune” mode, a feature designed to allow more musical and less mechanical pitch correction while still maintaining a strong corrective effect. However, his defining move is setting the Retune Speed to its fastest possible setting, often approaching zero milliseconds. This extreme setting snaps every sung or performed note instantly and perfectly to the nearest pitch in the selected key or scale, eliminating all natural human pitch variation and glide. The result is that stark, synthetic, and intentionally artificial vocal quality that defines tracks like “goth babe” and “i’m sorry”.

Crucially, Hollis does not use Auto-Tune merely as a corrective utility; he uses it as a primary creative instrument and effect. The pitch correction itself *is* the sound. This means he often records vocals with the processor active during tracking, committing to the processed sound from the start, rather than applying it as an afterthought in mixing. This workflow ensures the performance itself is shaped by the effect, with singers sometimes deliberately bending notes or singing with a specific intensity to interact with the harsh retune.

Beyond the core pitch snapping, he frequently layers additional processing to build his sonic palette. A common companion to Auto-Tune is Soundtoys Little AlterBoy, which he uses for formant shifting and drastic pitch modulation. By pitching the vocal up or down an octave or more with Little AlterBoy and then feeding that into Auto-Tune, he creates the iconic high-pitched, childlike, or demonically low secondary vocal layers that weave through his mixes. This combination of extreme formant change and instant pitch correction creates textures that are simultaneously cute and unsettling.

further texture comes from saturation and distortion plugins. He often runs his main and layered vocals through gentle tape saturation or more aggressive bit-crushing and distortion. This adds harmonic content and grit that complements the clean, digital sheen of the Auto-Tune. The saturation helps the synthetic vocal cut through dense, bass-heavy productions and adds analog warmth to contrast the digital precision of the pitch effect. Plugins like Decapitator or Saturn are common choices in this stage of his signal chain.

The choice of scales and keys within Auto-Tune is also a deliberate artistic choice. While he often uses standard major and minor scales, he sometimes employs pentatonic or modal scales that contribute to the haunting, anthemic, or melancholic feel of his melodies. The Auto-Tune is then tuned to that specific scale, ensuring every note locks into a harmonic framework that feels both familiar and slightly off-kilter, enhancing the emotional ambiguity of his music.

In terms of the actual mixing chain, the Auto-Tune processed vocal is usually placed early, right after the recording track and before most equalization and compression. This allows subsequent effects to process the already-synthetic signal. He might then use a de-esser to control sibilance, which can become exaggerated by extreme pitch shifting, and a compressor to control the dynamic range of the now-very-consistent vocal performance. The final vocal is then sent to reverbs and delays, often with high feedback and modulation, to place it in a vast, dreamlike, or cavernous space.

To summarize the practical application: to approximate the 2hollis vocal sound, one would insert Auto-Tune Pro on a vocal track, select a scale, set Retune Speed to 0 or 1, and use Flex-Tune. Then, duplicate the track, apply Soundtoys Little AlterBoy for formant and octave shifts, and send both to a bus with saturation. Experiment with different scales and formant settings to find the character—playful, eerie, or aggressive—that fits the song. The key is embracing the effect as the sound itself, not hiding it.

Ultimately, Hollis’s use of Auto-Tune represents a paradigm shift from viewing pitch correction as a stealth tool to wielding it as a bold, front-and-center stylistic device. It is integrated into his songwriting, production, and mixing as a single, cohesive process. The technology serves his aesthetic of blending cuteness with edge, vulnerability with synthetic power, creating a vocal identity that is unmistakably his own in the current musical landscape.