Cubase Generate Harmony Voices

[Varinia Swicegood]

Butnow I want to manually adjust some of the notes in the harmony parts to different complimentary notes using VariAudio but anytime I move any note in the generated Harmony parts, the notes immediate snap back to their original positions. Seems as though the only way I can actually move the notes freely is to disable the pitch changes.

Yes, you can use vari audio in the newly generated tracks exactly the same way as you do in any audio track.

I must say I have not done this since updating to 8.5 and will check this still works the same tomorrow.

From the resulting window choose how many voices to add and they will be split across the scale at intervals of a third. If you then return to the Project window you will see that a corresponding number of audio parts have been created, each containing the pitch-shifted parts, all of which will be perfectly in time. You are now able to edit them simultaneously by selecting them all and double-clicking on one. The Sample Editor will now show all VariAudio parts, each one in a different colour. Click on one to activate and edit it or select an active part from the Currently Edited menu at the top left.

Click on a Chord event and assign it to a chord (and an inversion, if you like). It helps here to know the key of your vocal material, and you can also input Chord Track data using a MIDI keyboard for greater flexibility and creating custom chords.

With this in place, repeat the procedure for generating harmony voices, perhaps this time limiting it to only one voice. The part that is created will follow your Chord Track instructions, and will most probably be much more appropriate to the original source material than simply adding third notes as before. Helpfully, you have the ability to modify the chords on-the-fly, since VariAudio is applying pitch changes in real time, so if you double-click on the Chord Track event while playing back you can change the harmonies by clicking new chord selections or inputting new data by hand.

If you're blessed with access to talented and technically knowledgeable vocalists, recording and mixing vocal harmonies can a real pleasure, but some of us don't have this luxury, and find ourselves needing to fake realistic harmony parts. Cubase 7 has a number of tools that can be used to do this pretty convincingly. In this article, I'll work through two scenarios, each starting with a single vocal take: creating multiple harmonies for vowel-based ('ooh', 'ahh', etc) backing vocals; and creating lead-vocal harmonies that follow the actual lyrics!

If you have a monophonic audio event selected, the Generate Harmony Voices option (found in the Audio menu) can be used to create up to four harmony parts from this original, each of which will be placed on a new audio track. If you've not defined a Chord Track for the project, these harmonies are created at a set number of semitone intervals from the original: the first harmony is +3 semitones; and subsequent voices are placed at -3, -6 and -9 semitones.

The original vocal (active) and the rather unmusical default four-part harmony generated in the absence of a Chord Track, all displayed in a single Sample Editor window. Note the drop-down menu at top-left that allows you to select which track is active for editing.In the absence of a Chord Track, although these default intervals are unlikely to result in anything that fits the harmonic structure of your song, they often serve as a useful starting point, particularly if you want to create a single harmony voice for a lead vocal. However, when you generate a four-part harmony, audio artifacts will become quickly apparent, particularly in the -6 and -9 semitone pitch-shifts. If your harmony parts are low in the mix, or you're deliberately going for a synthetic sound, this might be acceptable, but more realistic results are going to require fairly careful work.

Assuming you have one sung backing-vocal line, you can start by using the Generate Harmony Voices function to create four additional parts. These will automatically follow the Chord Track and, by default, you will end up with soprano, alto, tenor and bass parts (check the Inspector's Chord Track settings for each of the new tracks). The default output can be somewhat static and mechanical and, even in the context of a mix, a little further editing is generally required.

When doing such editing, use the Sample Editor and engage the Chord Track display option, so that the note segments appear colour coded (green for a note within the current chord, blue for a note within the current scale and red for anything else). This colour coding is a useful visual cue when you're manually editing the harmony-part pitches: unless you are feeling particularly experimental, avoid the red and aim for green or blue!

If the more extreme pitch-shifting makes some of the harmonies unusable, try resetting the pitch changes using VariAudio, and you can also try changing the Inspector's Chord Track settings to produce a second soprano or alto part, which might work better. Manually editing the VariAudio settings for this second version, perhaps adding some further pitch quantisation or applying a little audio quantisation, will help create the illusion of two different performances, even when both are 'faked' from the same original source.

You can also experiment with the way each harmony part follows the Chord Track. The Inspector's Chord Track tab provides plenty of possibilities, but it's going to be a case of trial and (lots of!) error; while I suspect that there are a few folks at Steinberg who understand fully how the various options interact, I found the Operation Manual a little lacking in its coverage of this feature. The Voicings setting is a good place to start: I recommend you set it to Basic, open the Settings dialogue box, and start experimenting with the Start Voicing setting. This changes the chord inversion used for the currently selected harmony. For the soprano, alto and tenor voices (the bass voice sticks to the root note of each chord), it allows you to quickly audition different possibilities.

Our second example is the creation of a single harmony that follows the lead vocal. The same techniques apply if you want to generate a couple of harmonies to add emphasis to selected words or phrases of the lead vocal. Generally, this requires a little more 'hands on' work than the preceding example. Let's take a typical scenario, in which we add a harmony part that's pitched a third above the main lead vocal (that is, based on the scale used for the melody, two notes above the lead vocal note).

Once you're happy with your harmonies, whether backing vocals or lead harmonies, it can be useful to apply the Flatten function (in the Process section of the Sample Editor) to each track, just to lock the VariAudio changes in place. Mix the 'fake' parts a few dB beneath the original vocals, apply a little panning, and the job is done.

All contents copyright SOS Publications Group and/or its licensors, 1985-2024. All rights reserved.

The contents of this article are subject to worldwide copyright protection and reproduction in whole or part, whether mechanical or electronic, is expressly forbidden without the prior written consent of the Publishers. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held responsible for its contents. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers.

Extreme vocal tuner:

Keep the Transform dial mostly left and choose lower Robotify values to use Humanoid as an instant hard tuner. Set the key and scale to match your song and adjust the quantize control to shape the pitch remapping behavior.

Voice controlled synthesizer:

Turn the Transform dial all the way right to create a wavetable synth you can play with your voice. Vocal features will no longer be heard, but the spectral content from your singing will be morphed into a synthesis waveform.

Vocal transformer and effects platform:

Use dramatic formant shifting, aggressive robotify settings and different combinations of the onboard effects to make your voice unrecognizable.

Synthetic vocal sound design workstation:

Blend between tuning and resynthesis using custom user wavetables and advanced calibration settings to create the next evolution of synthetic vocals. Use the ultra aggressive filter to carve out a unique presence in the mix.

Infinite harmony generator:

Use Humanoid in MIDI mode to generate as many variations on a vocal line as you could ever need for harmonies, backups and robotic choir effects. Enable the secondary synth interval and add a low or high octave for super thick double and triple-tracked harmonies.

Humanoid is primarily intended for production and mixing work. However, if you want to use it live, set the buffer size to 'Small' in the top right of the interface. This will result in low latency but with less reliable pitch tracking.

The purpose of Humanoid is to make vocals sound unnatural and robotic. To achieve this, the plugin re-synthesizes the voice. If you want a natural vocal sound, you should not use Humanoid. Or if you want just a touch of the effect, you can use the dry/wet mix knob in the Output calibration panel to dial-in a smaller amount of processing.

Make no mistakes, however: Humanoid is a celebration of the species it was named after and our infinite creative potential. Made by humans, for humans, this plugin lets us penetrate into the domain of the machine before the machine breaks into ours.

zplane's Vielklang 2 CM is a totally exclusive, CM-branded edition of their Vielklang 2 Instant Harmony harmoniser plugin. Take a monophonic audio (or MIDI part), automatically detect what key it's in, and generate up to three harmonies to go with it, based on the detected key and scale.

The plugin also packs in advanced pitch correction, allowing you to edit the tuning and timing of audio material in a graphical manner. And with zplane being the DSP geniuses behind the elastique pitch/time processing used in tons of big-name software packages (Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio... the list goes on!), you know it's gonna sound absolutely top-notch. See it in action in our video, and get the plugin with issue 220 of Computer Music.

3a8082e126