A while back, I wanted to create a song that stretched what could be done with RT solo instruments. The first portion played the melody fairly closely, but after that the instruments would "imply" the melody more than actually hit specific notes.

I thought the result was fairly good: Over The Rainbow

I decided to use the harmonica on the track because at that time not many RT instruments had long notes. If I were to do it again, I'd probably try a fiddle or cello.

In any event, I generated a bunch of harmonica tracks. Because the I had a specific rhythm I needed, I found the phrases that were "close enough", and in some cases, I stretched/compressed them in time a bit.

Then I used pitch shifting to move them to the notes I wanted.

The rest of the solos were constructed in a similar way - I found phrases I liked, and in some cases time stretched/compressed and did a bit of tweaking to some of the notes.

Since I had a specific melody I wanted the instruments to imply, there was a bit of pitch shifting going on.

But that's pretty unusual. Most of the time, it's just a matter of generating solos and finding my favorite bits and stringing them together.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?