So with all you great BIAB people out there have any of you ever come across a harmony and or vocal gender changer, agent, tool, VST that works well and doesn’t sound too hokey. I can do my own lead and harmony vocals no problem but sometimes you want that nice female harmony and or chorus us singers, male and female to add to your track.

Also I have many female vocalists I can call on but two problems arise

1. Availability of the singer(s)

2. Price or cost for the sessions

I don’t always have the $50-$200 to pay for someone to come do harmonies or leads and they ae often busy and I may need a female demo asap for a song pitch I am working.
So any feedback on some tools would be greatly appreciated.

You might want to try Celemony Melodyne.

It doesn't work directly in BIAB or RealBand, other than you can export an audio track out of BIAB/RealBand, work on it in the stand-alone Melodyne editor (versus the VST-based editor), and then bring it back into BIAB or RealBand. I use it that way often. It does work well with other DAW's as a VST plugin.

You'll probably want at least Melodyne Assistant ($249) or Melodyne Editor ($399). Both of these editions give you the ability to shift pitch, shift formant, shift time, vibrato control, etc. However, it won't replace an actual vocalist.

It does take some work, patience, and a learning curve, but you can do some pretty cool things with it.

I use Melodyne quite a bit with RealBand. I record vocals in RealBand, then export out as WAV files, make the tweaks in Melodyne stand-alone, save the file as a new name, then import it back into RealBand.

It has a 30-day, no commitment trial version, so you can get an idea of whether it meets your needs or not.

Other folks may have some different solutions.

John,

I have a copy of Melodyne 3 (I believe not at my PC) I have tried it a bit but as you said it seems to take some work.

I know there is no replacing the real thing, and I am mostly looking for the backing, harmonies etc.

Thanks...

I haven't worked with it, but there are some hardware devices out there. One such is the Voice Live Touch by TC Helicon. BIAB can do what is called Output Chords (it's an option in Preferences) and devices like these can take the melody line from their input and add harmony based on the chords being played by BIAB.

Speaking of TC Helicon, I believe PowerTracks Pro by PG Music, a separate inexpensive product, has a software version of what I just described. PowerTracks Pro is the predecessor of RealBand, but it still has one or two additional features not in RealBand.

The TC-Helicon tool included in RealBand, BIAB, and PowerTracks will perform pitch correction and harmonization; however, as best as I can tell, it does not use the new Elastique pitch shifting feature that RealTracks (and other audio tracks) now use, so when using it, it is easy to end up with, well, interesting sounding results. I don't think it has been updated in many, many years, so has not benefitted from some of the new features. That's too bad (and maybe PGMusic can revisit this, as I'm sure TC-Helicon have made significant improvements to their algorithms over time - hint, hint). But I have used it on several projects and it works fairly well, as long as you sing it straight, keep the harmonies pretty close and bury it pretty well in the mix.

Tony, you didn't mention which flavor of Melodyne you had, but if you only have Melodyne Essentials, it's not going to give you the features you need. It's the "Assistant" and "Editor" versions that have the cool features.

This page shows the feature differences.

Ok thanks guys...

As I am not at home and I haven't used Melodyn in a while I only recall it was version 3... Which flavour I don't recall I recieved as a free tool from a friend who no longer used the SW.

I have had moderate success feeding a recorded vocal into the VLT and recording different harmonies and accompanying vocal lines. If you are interested in sending me the files I could give it a go and return a couple vocal track options for you to consider. Could be fun... PM me if you are interested.

Thanks John for the info on Melodyne. To create harmonies, essentially the song chord structure is also needed?

What feature of Melodyne Editor or Assistant could be used to create harmonies? Or would this be a very manual approach, note-by-note.

Best
Trevor

Someone else may know more about it than I do, but I believe creating harmonies is going to be a manual process.

Something easily done is to highlight a bunch of notes and then move them up or down whatever interval you want (for example). From there, you can easily move individual notes to where you want them to be.

There are a number of YouTube videos available on how to do this.

Great John, thanks for the ideas!

Google/bing software vocal harmonizers and you will find a number of them with prices ranging from free to hundreds of dollars.

Personally I use Melodyne Editor. I copy the vocal track, raise or lower the copied track then examine the track and correct any notes that do not sound great. The software does not follow chords so you have to know what chords you are working with and when raising an entire track say a third all notes will be raised a third thus putting some in conflict. For example it may put a F in a D chord, thus you must raise/lower the F to a F# or E.

Melodyne is the best that I have found a creating harmonies, but even with it if you get too far from the original note(s) you will get anomalies.

Good luck.

Hi Tony...

There is a discussion in "Tips and Tricks" that might be of some use to you.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=207749#Post207749

The harmonizer that comes with BIAB (and RealBand) can be quite useful for background harmonies if used judiciously... I used to use it all the time - but have settled more on doing them myself - though I still use them (along with my own) at times to get a big sound... it's quite easy to do in RB (explained in the TnT thread)...

floyd

Awesome...thank you all again for the great info...

Another nice feature of Melodyne also is that you can adjust the formant to get a different quality to your voice (but use it judiciously). That way, your harmony singer doesn't sound like you are singing harmony with yourself.

Cool...

I'm just mostly looking at doing just that, not having every harmony sound like I'm singing with me.

And to add a different sound like a female sounding voice...and or multiple vocals as in a choir or Ooooos....and Ahhhhssss...

The BIAB/RB harmonizer plugin (TC Helicon) is great for this. Sing a basic OOOOhhh/AAAAhhhh track to compliment your vocal track - then take that into RB - load your SGU file and generate 4 harmonies...

mixed well, it will give very nice Oh/Ah's...

Awesome...can't wait to try it...

I use Nectar for vocal processing and it has some harmony capabilities but I have not played with it enough to know how well it works. I have a stand-alone stompbox from TC-Helicon that does some pretty awesome harmonies. But in all cases I agree with Floyd that you really have to use these judiciously as they start to sound pretty fake very fast!

ST3 has some nice gender specific Ooooos....and Ahhhhssss... which you can add via a midi keyboard. Just an idea.

Jazzmandan pardon my ignorance but what is ST3?

Sample Tank 3

Oh ok thanks

These have tempted me a couple of times but I do not have them yet so cannot completely vouch for them!

http://realitone.com/blue/

http://realitone.com/realivox/

Voice changing and pitch correction; .. the free Kerovee is not that bad in comparison to far more expensive VST plugins: http://www.g200kg.com/en/software/kerovee.html - F

Another very good 1-4 part software harmonizer is

http://products.zplane.de/vielklang

I have this one and it works very well. You might want to try the demo in RB as I use it in Sonar.

There is this tool called CloneEnsemble (http://www.cloneensemble.com/) that might work for you. It will take your singing and change the note and change the formants to sound like women's voices. You can try it out first to see if you want to buy it ($25.00 US).

Great info thanks gang...

Here is what I purchased. When I put my songs together anymore I just use this. I do the lead vocal, transfer the song to my MR8 HD/CD then I hook up my vocal harmonizer as to where I mute the lead vocal, sing and let the vocal harmonizer do the rest. You can control pitch here. There is a little learning curve here but not to bad. Here is the link.

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/tc-helicon-voicelive-play

Just stumbled on this today and thought of this thread... I think it applies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oajoay2U3tA