Best Vocal Manipulation Plugins
Henrietta Naughton
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.
When it comes to buying a plugin specifically for vocals, you need to decide what your needs are from the many issues vocalists have. It might well be that a simple EQ is all you require, just to bolster certain frequencies to give your vocal more body, or remove mid and high frequencies to reduce overall harshness.
More likely you will have tuning issues. Even the best vocalists will have an off day in the studio and you might be left with the odd note to put in place, or you might simply need software to help 'guide' your vocalist as they sing. With all tuning issues, there are lots of options available, from software that gets right into a mix to edit tuning issues (Celemony Melodyne) to simple plugins like Little AlterBoy that nudge your pitch manually.
Before I caved and subscribed to MusicPutty yesterday, I used Waves Tune RT in Cubasis 3. I tried Bleass Voices for autotuning, but it's "okay" at best (it's better at creating backing vocal harmonies from a single recording). With MusicPutty, you can import a clean vocal recording and just tune it all by hand. Very intuitive interface that's easier to use than Vocal Tune Studio.
But got a turntable and mic, routed that joins to a mix, into bleass voices etc. Might be cool to layer voices. Then layer or record samish or different scratch voices through the bleass, also. Then a bit of midi choir harmonics to the released scratch sample.
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