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VoiceMachine

An effect that can turn a solo singer into a choir or Posh Spice into Robbie Williams? Not quite, but Ian Waugh sings its praises...

Of all "instruments" the human voice remains the most popular. It is also the most distinctive and the most difficult to process without destroying its unique quality.

Steinberg's VoiceMachine is a "real time voice transformer" designed specifically for process vocals although you can apply to any audio sound, often with distinctive results.

It's a VST plug-in so you need a sequencer that supports these - most mainstream ones do - and you get both PC and Mac versions in the same box. Installation is easy peasy.

Good processor

VoiceMachine actually consists of two effects - the VM Processor and the VM Generator. The Processor features pitch shifting, an LFO and formant control. Formants are the qualities that make a human voice distinctive, and particularly what differentiates male from female voices.

If you have even speeded up a vocal you will have heard the chipmunk effect. This is what happens when the entire pitch of a vocal is raised but the formants change. However, by preserving the formants, you can change the pitch of a voice without changing its essential characteristics so male stays male and female stays female.

And by adjusting the formants but keeping the pitch the same, you can change a male voice into a female voice and vice versa. This is great fun! Using the pitch control in the VM Processor, you can apply all variations of pitch and formant shifting to create all manner of voices. These can sound very natural, very dark, very twee, or very sci fi.

The Processor also includes an LFO with delay for adding or enhancing the vibrato in a voice.

Finally, you can play vocals from an attached MIDI keyboard, using the keys to control the pitch. Alternatively, you can use a pre-recorded MIDI track. This is quite vocoder-like and quite impressive.

I'd like to teach the World to sing...

The VM Generator generates up to four-part harmonies from a single vocal line. You might want to read that again... It also has pitch, formant and LFO controls for each part along with pan and volume controls. You can play four-part chords live on a MIDI keyboard or, again, use a pre-recorded sequence.

The results are astonishing and quite impressive! You really want to hear it and you can do just that by clicking on this link to download a short audio demo.

To be fair, the effectiveness of the harmonies will depend on the original vocal and the sort of harmonies you are trying to achieve. A Barbershop quartet works extremely well as does classical chant-type harmonies.

The processing, almost unavoidably, may add unwanted side effects which can make the output a little electronic. The source vocal needs to be extremely clean and free from background noise otherwise this gets processed as well.

As part of a mix in modern rock, pop or Dance music, this will largely go unnoticed but don't try to duplicate the King's Choir or you may be disappointed.

Summary

The VoiceMachine is unique and inexpensive, enormous fun, and it can produce excellent and impressive results suitable for a wide range of music for creating harmonies or simply to beef-up a vocal line. Highly recommended.

Ian Waugh

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