Recording - March 2011 - 34

PLUG-IN OUTLET
iZotope Nectar Complete Vocal Suite
By Paul Vnuk Jr.
Billed as a “complete vocal suite”, iZotope’s Nectar contains 11 full-fledged vocal effects, and yet it is not a plug-in bundle, it is one plug-in that has all of the following under its hood: compression, eq, gate, de-esser, limiter, saturation, doubling, delay and reverb. If that wasn’t enough there is also full-on pitch correction, and last but not least, a breath control module. The Nectar experience begins with a drop-down preset browser. Choose a preset and you are off and running. Presets are organized by musical style and range from Hip-Hop to Classical, Rock to Pop, Country to Soul, Folk to Jazz as well as Special FX, Voice Over and more. Each one is further subdivided by genre-appropriate criteria. Main and Advanced Views Nectar launches in Main View with its module window organized in three sections: Tools, Enhancements, and Eq. The tools are the DeEsser, Breath Control, Gate and Pitch Correction; the enhancements are the more effects-based fare and include Level (Pre-amp/Loudness), Space (reverb) and additional preset-specific parameters with witty names like: Psychedelic, Girth, Whisp, Producer, and Motown, to name a few; and the eq section is a 5-band, visual-style equalizer with dragable frequency nodes and Q’s. To the right of this is a set of LED I/O meters, as well as buttons for: Reset—a global reset History—multiple selectable levels of undo and redo Options—for tweaking the plug-in’s global characteristics Help—an online manual Advanced—switches between Main and Advanced Views Hours of fun can be had by doing nothing more than auditioning presets and tweaking them to taste, but the true sweetness of Nectar happens in Advanced View. In this view, all eleven effects appear as a list of buttons on the left. The top-to-bottom order denotes signal flow, and with the exception of Pitch Correction and Breath, which are always first, they can be rearranged into any order. Each section can also be toggled on or off. Clicking a button opens the selected effect in the edit window. The effects Pitch Correction: Nectar’s pitch correction comes in two flavors: Automatic and Advanced. In Automatic mode, you choose a key and scale and then apply various levels of speed and accuracy, similar to the workflow familiar to users of Antares Auto-Tune. At low levels it does very subtle basic correction, but it can easily be pushed into the now popular “T-Pain” effect heard on much of today’s hip-hop. The Advanced mode captures and analyzes a section of audio and allows you to zoom in and correct the notes by hand on a piano-roll grid, somewhat like the approach of Celemony Melodyne. As you may guess, Advanced mode is far better for the most believable and accurate results. Breath Control: Using an intensive look-ahead process, Breath Control detects and eliminates and/or lowers the breaths between sung notes or spoken words. It is a little tweaky, but surprisingly effective on slow and well-spaced vocal phrases. You do need to be careful on both fast runs and voiceover work, where it can be a tad too noticeable. Of all of Nectar’s effects, this is the one I am still getting the hang of.
34
RECORDING MARCH 2011

Recording - March 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2011