Love it or hate it, Antares Auto Tune revolutionized music recording. Personally I fall on the positive side of the balance; I’m not much for completely Auto Tuning a track into submission, but I’ll happily use it to lightly touch up an otherwise great performance. And I think many people miss the creative possibilities that Auto Tune provides for new sounds and effects (no, I’m not referring to the tired “Cher” robot effect).
Now Antares has struck gold again, with a new vocal processing bundle called AVOX. AVOX consists of five separate plug-ins, each dedicated to, and optimized for, a single aspect of vocal recording and production.
Throat does for vocals what amplifier/effects modelers have done for guitar. The plug-in neutralizes the effect of the singer’s original vocal tract, and allows you to apply new modeled characteristics to the voice’s “glottal waveform” – stretch, shorten, widen, constrict the tract, and adjust the position and width of the vocal cords, throat, mouth, and lips. You can add noise for effects from breathiness to raspiness to whispering, or go beyond the range of human anatomy and create completely new sounds.
Choir turns a single voice into 4, 8, 16, or 32 unison voices, each with its own pitch, timing, and vibrato variations. You can pan the voices across the stereo field to create a wide, lush sound.
Duo generates a doubled vocal part from the existing vocal. You can program pitch and timing variations as well as vibrato. A simplified version of Throat allows you to change the timbre of the doubled voice for more realism. The double can have independent pan and level settings from the original. Duo can also be used to correct a track that has too much or too little vibrato.
Punch is more than just a basic compressor. It’s optimized to give a vocal maximum impact, clarity, and power. Besides sounding great, it’s very easy to operate.
Sybil takes the concept of de-essing to an entirely new level, with control over threshold, ratio, attack, and decay, as well as variable high-pass frequency for matching response to any vocalist.
I was lucky enough to receive a pre-release version of AVOX in RTAS format (VST and Audio Units formats are also offered), and installed it on my Pro Tools rig. I found that while you can play with the controls of each of the plug-ins, it helps – especially with Throat, which performs complex processing – to read the excellent manual so that you understand what the plug-ins are doing and how to apply them. Once I had a basic understanding, I settled in for an evening of knob twisting. And I had a blast! These plug-ins are clearly optimized for vocals. Sybil and Punch work very well for controlling dynamics and de-essing – you can really dial in Sybil for the best results. Punch is capable of everything from subtle level control to adding an intense, in-your-face vocal quality. There’s overload protection, so you can pump things way up without worrying about digital overs.
Duo and Choir are very impressive. We’ve all created “double tracking” effects using delays, but this is something entirely different. With the right control settings, Duo can convincingly create the effect of a second person doubling the original vocal. Choir can do everything from adding “depth” to a vocal to sounding like a massive group singing along on the same part. These two plug-ins are even better when you use them in combination – run through Duo, then route the two voices through separate instances of Choir for a huge effect. For multipart performances, route the outputs of a harmonization plug-in through separate instances of Duo or Choir (or both).
Throat is unlike anything you’ve heard before. You can subtly alter the tone of a voice, or create completely whacked-out sounds. You can get “filtered” sounds, add odd resonances, and more. On the “conventional” side, Throat can change the way your brain perceives a voice; the right changes can make the singer seem older, affect gender, adjust tone without sounding EQed, and much more. Since the range of human anatomy is actually quite small, tiny control changes can make quite a difference in the resulting sound. This is an intriguing, powerful, and useful plug-in.
I’m hooked on AVOX for vocal processing. For my money, Choir and Duo are worth the price of admission by themselves; add in Punch and Sybil, and you have an excellent vocal solution. But the star of the show, Throat, pushes AVOX way over the edge into completely new territory.
