How do you deal with tuning "non-singers"

I'm not great at tuning, but I am working with an artist who does not have an understanding of the modal degree, not his own range. On the first group of songs I found that one some things it was about trying the different tools.  Some notes needed the blob moved into the right pitch (or at least a pitch in the scale) where others needed the inflection smoothed out. Some needed both.  

I need to get a little better at it, but Melodyne is not something I want to spend my time with, even though I know would behoove me... 

No one is ever going to pay me even 5-minutes of my time dealing with pitch-correction (and they shouldn’t) when there are plenty of computer-wizards around the world who can do it all amazingly in 5-minutes.

Then you have the songs that are so good and they spent so much time with you, crafting their song, you’re willing to put in as much time as necessary until it’s “right”, on your own time, if you have to.

Many times, absolutely everything is plowed-through. If you don’t care, then I don’t either.

What’s worse? I’m dealing with that right now. Singing in the wrong key or straight-up hitting the tons of wrong-notes? What are you even talking about? No no no. No one cares about that stuff. It’s only all about what’s hot and being even somewhat in tune obviously has nothing to do with that. I could secretly fix things (without getting paid) and no one would know. At least I wouldn’t cringe every time and maybe be a bit less embarrassed for being associated with it, but why should I do that? It’s all getting over 1M streams after a couple months of release without a single bit of promotion, so what the hell do I know?

i don‘t know how exactly but i guess KI should do it for you. you have enough samples of the voice recorded. now make someone else sing it with a in tune voice. now exchange the voice with KI and use the outoftune singer voice.
ain‘t that how they make john lennon sing every song on the planet on yt?!?!

if I'm recording it, then I would ask them to do it again (or at least try).  but if they cannot, then you have to start talking about moving the key, or changing the melody to something they can sing. Or polish the turd.  But I suppose you are just mixing it?   Melodyne is great for minor corrections but it cannot work miracles.  I had one person that thought they could sing (painful) and even after applying Melodyne to hit the right notes, it still sucked.  Melodyne can't fix tone or inflection or feeling or emotion...   if it sounds bad to start with all you can do is make it in tune, but it will still sound bad. 

One time I was struggling with this and I ended up automating the “tuning strength” selectively. This is with the plugin alliance tuner with the dumb name. Worked well though.

That's were the other tools in Melodyne can [sometimes] help. The drift can be reigned in. 

Going through his old catalog, Albini RIP had a way to make really off pitch singers at least sound interesting. Might be a place for inspiration?

Otherwise I sometimes push the tuning bar into sharper/flatter places to get the tuning to sit more “in tune”. And I HATE tuning. So much trial and error. Sometimes the “target” is on a note that is not in the key just because the tuning isn’t forceful enough. Other tricks, lower volume on terrible notes and bury it in automated echo/room etc

I use ReaTune, since I’m not a big vocal tuner and it’s free.

Anyway, it allows you to set max/min notes, so you don’t get the jumping around thing. Sometimes I’ve done that for a word.. either print it out, or put that word on its own track/chain

I get it...but this is a business. If a client wants to give me $10k for a project, then I'm not going to not do the job as a matter of cultural protest lol.

Yeah but if they want the steak well done then you serve it to them well done because otherwise they'll send it back.

Tried Re-Pitch Standard...I'm sure I could get used to using this...found the tool shortcuts and that made things quicker. It definitely does some things nicely that Melodyne has trouble with sometimes...but where it seems like Melodyne has its issues with transients causing some artifacts if they're changed, Repitch has a "sound" to it - it sounds like Autotune. It does an excellent job when you have to draw stuff in - Melodyne doesn't have that - but it can be the equivalent of bad "face tuning" in a photo. It's so smoothed out it gives it away as fake. Kinda sounds like that to me. But I'm sure you could learn to pull it back. It would be nice to have this for stuff that's not working in Melodyne, though. wiz - what's the diff in the elements and standard versions?