Vocal Suite Plugin
Autumn Pitz
The new AIR Vocal Suite is the first completely standalone vocal plugin collection. MPC has once again raised the standard for music production hardware by making it possible to perform, record, and mix the perfect vocals.
AIR Vocal Tuner is a revolutionary automatic pitch correction plugin for MPC standalone devices and MPC Desktop software. Whatever modern vocal sound you're aiming for, AIR Vocal Tune can achieve it instantly. Apply gentle, discreet pitch correction on a slow jam ballad or in-your-face robotic-style processing for melodic rap - all with ease. The versatile AIR Vocal Tuner is ready for any style and genre with a powerful set of controls to quickly dial in detection behavior key, scale and retune time.
Sometimes the right melody needs some harmony to stand out. The AIR Harmonizer delivers the power to create full 4-part harmonies instantly. Add a 5th below, a major or minor 3rd above, or even create a full background vocal section from one track of audio. Dive deeper into AIR Harmonizer and adjust EQ, Pan and more for a harmonic section that sits perfectly in the mix. With AIR Harmonizer generating the additional voices, you don't have to worry about the timing or pitch issues associated with stacking vocal tracks or with multiple background singers. Use AIR Harmonizer to get professional vocal results while saving time and finishing your tracks faster.
When you want to add power, create separation or just try something different with your vocals, pull up the AIR Doubler plugin. Load AIR Doubler on a vocal track and easily create dimension, width and separation. Stack perfect doubles without the time-consuming task of cycle recording vocals. Dial in AIR Doubler for those thick vocals that sit perfectly in the center of the mix and cut through any music project.
This plugin is magic. Lets me use the Manley Voxbox with a compressor and all with my Neumann U87, which raises the noise floor by a LOT. Add my studio light which has a weak, but still audible fan, and the noisefloor gets high. But with this plugin, I can confidently get rid of all that and keep my fundamental vocal frequencies. The only noticeable artifacts are a liiitle less warmth (so I compensate with the voxbox), and my breaths are attenuated, which can be desirable in many situations. I now have the confidence to record in my studio any time, all the time. Thanks, UAD!
What can I say... This thing, and I paid full price for it, is simply magical. I've been able to process my VO signal on the fly in realtime and it simply blows my mind how effective it is. Yeah... there are others and I don't fault them at all... but this thing, in conjunction with my Apollo, makes it effortless. Couldn't be happier.
Impeccable. Incredibly transparent. I use this weekly in a live venue setting, with Antares autotune via inserts on an Avid VENUE live sound console. There is nothing else at this level for noise reduction with zero-latency.
Remarkable, secret weapon, my broadcast feed from FOH sounds studio produced.
I've used RX for years but I've grown tired of dealing with latency and the artifacts RX leaves. C-Suite C-Vox is more transparent with the added bonus of drying up your signal. It's two brilliant, zero latency plugins in one. An A+ no-brainer.
The Auto-Tune effect is probably the biggest decider when it comes to vocal processing. This is the slightly synthetic and quantised vocal sound that has been a chart staple in many dance and rap genres since Cher made the effect famous in the song Believe in 1998. As well-trodden and arguably worn out this effect is, you can't deny its continued popularity, and those predicting its demise have been many and all mistaken over the last couple of decades. With that in mind, then, an 'Auto-Tune' like plugin is a good tool to have in your armoury and at least four of our options will deliver it, from the simple AlterBoy right up to the one that started it all, Auto-Tune Pro.
If singing is important to your songs and recordings then there are plenty of software plugins available to assist your recording and editing endeavours. The best vocal plugins are many and varied and can be used to help make great vocal recordings, or turn bad takes into recordings that can be used in any mix.
Vocal processing plugins include general mix plugins for adding EQ solidity and sparkle to male or female vocals, or classic, colourful compression for a vintage vibe. For vocalists with tuning issues or for that contemporary 'Auto-tune' effect, there are automatic tuning plugins to help your vocalist hit the right notes or recreate the classic Cher-like jumping effect. Finally there are more esoteric and bespoke vocal processors that focus on specific tasks like de-essing or double-tracking.
If you have tuning issues or want that 'Auto-tune' effect then there are a couple of clear contenders, the most obvious being the daddy of them all, Auto-Tune Pro. It's managed to stay ahead of the rest by heaping in some wonderful and easy to implement features, over and above that classic vocal effect, and has almost become the 'Hoover' of plugins along the way. That said, if you want the quick, down and dirty version then Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy impresses us with its simplistic but beautiful approach to not only Auto-Tune style effects, but brilliant male to female and female to male formant editing and more.
Advanced view has a few extras like Create Vibrato, ideal for adding a bit of wobble via an LFO, plus options to set minor and major modes, edit across multiple octaves, and MIDI input editing features.
Auto-Tune Pro is the most powerful, usable incarnation of this standard yet, and easily maintains the software's position as one of the best retuning solutions available, and may well prove to be the ultimate pitch-manipulating toolbox.
Recent additions include a Melodic algorithm that allows editing of noise-based sibilants to be carried out separately from pitch-based parts. Vocal pitch editing is also now incredibly natural due to features like a Levelling Macro that balances quiet and loud elements, and even the tiniest of pitch deviations can be tweaked.
Double-clicking the spectral display creates a new EQ band, with its adjustable parameters appearing so you can easily tweak frequency, gain, EQ, plus the band's filter shape and slope. And of course there's a good variety of shapes to quickly adjust a signal's tonal balance.
Soothe is an automatic dynamic frequency editor, and designed to remove harshness from instrumental and vocal recordings. It uses spectral processing to detect unpleasant resonances, and dynamically attenuates them via numerous level-sensitive notch filters. You might think this sounds like an EQ, but the band nodes control the reduction sensitivity dynamically within their specific frequency ranges. If you raise a node on screen, it will notch out the resonances within that band more profoundly as the volume increases.
Soothe makes this a beautifully realised process and the plugin has been a big hit with producers around the world. The latest version 2 reduces CPU load and latency and has much faster rendering, plus a wider frequency range that covers the lower end down to 20Hz. It also comes with many more EQ options than the debut version.
VocAlign is a long-established market-leading tool that adjusts the timing of an audio file (Dub) so it matches that of a source (Guide). It works well with any audio and is used for many music and post-production tasks. However it is particularly in demand for vocals and speech, where accurate pitch and timing alignment can be crucial. VocAlign Ultra sits between the affordable but basic VocAlign Project and Synchro Arts' flagship processor, Revoice Pro 4.
If there's one plugin that comes up more often than any other in our producer interviews as an all-time favourite, it's Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy. This simple but cheap plugin only boasts a few controls but can deliver wide-ranging results on any audio, but is specifically aimed at vocals for both pitch and format editing.
The Formant option can, again very naturally, sweep a male vocal into a female, or vice versa. It's pretty incredible to hear it in operation because one of AlterBoy's main attractions is the fact that it does it with no nonsense, one dial with all the science bits hidden away. It just gets on with it, with brilliant results.
The central Modes are where things get even more interesting. After a simple Transpose option, you get Quantize, where notes are forced to the nearest semi-tone for that Auto-Tune like effect that has seemingly been a mainstay in so many genres for so many years. It works well and incredibly simply, although you'll probably get more finesse and tweakability out of the real-deal reviewed above. However, for no nonsense results, this is great. Finally here you also get Robot Mode, where the pitch is frozen to one note, no matter what the original input is singing. This pitch, and indeed the formant, can still be changed with the left hand dials.
There are two knobs, Pitch and Formant, controlling the central tone of the human vocal and the resonant frequencies that shape the timbre of the vocal. A Flatten button allows you to force the input to snap to a predetermined note, a speedy tool for building up augmented choruses and harmonies.
Experiment with the modulation and automation options, and vast creative scope presents itself. Automation can be a superb way of introducing vocal effects (such as sudden pitch drops) that activate based on the volume of the input signal, so the intensity of your performance can be the triggering factor.
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