EQ Magazine - March 2009 - (Page 51)

ANTARES HARMONY ENGINE to the scrutiny of the solo button but when blended in behind the main vocal, sounds exceptionally convincing. I was even able to add an octave above “female” voice that was more than credible (editing the throat length improved the realism; try 0.90, it worked for me). Again, I wouldn’t promote the harmony into a lead vocal, but it worked fine as a background voice. Octave lower effects are harder to pull off, but mixing them considerably in the background gave my voice a nice degree of gravitas. (Or perhaps a timbre more like an NFL linebacker, come to think of it.) Other thumbs-up features are humanizing options that add variety (pitch, timing, glide, and natural vibrato keep/suppress), a “freeze” effect, and the ability to store 15 different harmony presets that you can call up via automation—when the song modulates, you needn’t panic. You also have multiple outputs if you want to run the vocals through different mixer channels and processing (e.g., reverb), assuming your host supports this. Even cooler: the “Chord By Name” mode where you simply program a song’s chord progression, then use the Register and Spread controls to “arrange” the harmonies by ear. Easy. Limitations: Harmony Engine is definitely a “garbage in—garbage out” device, and the cleaner the vocal, the better the tracking. It’s important to select the right vocal range, and there’s a tracking control labeled with Trial at the top and Error at the bottom. The labeling is correct: I couldn’t figure out what it was doing, but some settings worked better than others. In extreme cases, you can copy the vocal track, clean it up with de-essing, EQ, compression, etc., process it through the Harmony Engine, and mix it in with the original track. Also, several programs aren’t officially supported—Ableton Live being one of them. So of course I had to try it out, and to my delight, it worked just fine. Bottom Line: Despite what may appear to be a daunting interface, Harmony Engine is actually quite easy to use. The well-written manual is also very helpful in terms of not just understanding, but applying, the feature set. This harmony tool is no one-trick pony, especially if you feed it with MIDI to change presets and such; I also found that just tuning to unison and adding humanizing could enhance vocals considerably. Harmony Engine does lots of things, does them well, and is reasonably-priced . . . it’s tough to beat. Fig. 1. When you want “in the box” harmonies, Antares’ Harmony Engine is tough to beat on the basis of usefulness, functionality, and cost. If any company has made a name for itself with vocal software processing, it’s Antares. From the original AutoTune through Kantos to AVOX to Harmony Engine ($349), the company has come up with consistently interesting vocal tools—and you can download demo versions that are fully functional for 10 days. Translation: just long enough to get you hooked. What it does: Harmony Engine (RTAS, VST, AU; see Figure 1) provides up to four voices of harmonies, and these are “intelligent”—not parallel—harmonies that follow a specified scale. How you specify that scale, though, is where things get interesting. You can simply provide a root note and scale for simple harmonies, play the four harmony voices as if your vocal was recorded in a sampler and you were playing the samples, have Harmony Engine listen to a MIDI track that provides a “chord guide” (like the way DigiTech’s VL-series processors “listen” to a guitar to figure out the harmony), or program a chord progression. That’s the basic idea, but within the way big GUI (I think the designer may have been paid by the pixel) there are a wealth of other tools and effects. Each of the four voices has pan, interval, level, solo, and mute controls, as well as vibrato. But there’s also a “throat length” parameter than can change the harmony line’s character, from (for lack of a better description) looser to more constricted. You don’t have to include the input signal in the mix; it can be harmonies only. What’s cool: For the harmonies you’re most likely to use, such as thirds, the sound quality may not stand up relies on converting notes to MIDI data, manipulating vocals is like manipulating MIDI: You can move the note, transpose it, alter pitch, quantize, and so on. In fact, Celemony Melodyne, Antares Auto-Tune Evo, Waves Tune, and Sonar V-Vocal allow pulling out the MIDI file so you can use it to drive something other than voice—want to sing a trumpet part, then have it played by a trumpet sound? Yes, you can. Celemony’s Melodyne cre8 even installs a synth when you install the program, just to get the point across. (Those with long memories might recall that Opcode’s StudioVision included audio-to-MIDI conversion, but it lacked the sophisti- cated pitch and formant correction we associate with today’s tools.) Sometimes MIDI works both ways, too, where MIDI input can constrain notes within a scale you play. Should you use correction to make sure all pitches are “perfect”? No. Not everyone wants to sing exactly on key—hitting a seventh note just a tiny www.eqmag.com MARCH 2009 EQ 51 http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - March 2009

EQ Magazine - March 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Mr. Scruff Apollo Sunshine Al Schmitt Toolbox Third Eye Blind Kind of Blue Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Ableton Live Vocal Tools Gadgets & Goodies Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - March 2009

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