TAXI.com

n/a

PDebik wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 20, 2022 1:23 am

Has someone here noticed the same and can someone please enlighten me what to use to make vocals sound as artificial as the ones you are hearing in the Top 20 on the radio today?

It depends - there's loads of techniques. Would need to listen to a specific track to break it down, but generally abusing autotune or similar

See Tip 2 here

https://youtu.be/EtLQtY47H3k

Beyond unnatural pitch shifting possibilities (typically know as "the AutoTune effect", whether it is made with AutoTune or otherwise), which tend to be along the lines of quantizing pitch, with different speeds of transition times, scale conformance, etc., there are plugins that make other manipulations. A few that come to mind include Waves Vocal Bender (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5jGKon0sOg for an overview) and vocal synthesis plugins like Waves OVox and iZotope VocalSynth 2. Waves's new Harmony plugin is also an interesting "toy" in this area, not only for generating harmonies based on a vocal plus what you play via MIDI (and/or program in the plugin), but also for tasks like doubling an octave higher or lower. You could do that sort of thing with other pitch shifters, too, but these relatively new Waves plugins seem to be specifically optimized for modern music tricks, and specifically for vocal tricks, whereas some of the more traditional pitch shifters were more general in application.
Some of these new toys seem to treat the vocal more like a synth (and not just the specific voice-based synth plugins), for example letting you add LFOs and other modulators.

I've only played with these things a bit, but I've watched a lot of the Waves videos on their series with the same guy in the video I linked above), and he's always got good tips for modern pop and hip-hop uses of these plugins.

n/a

n/a

n/a

PDebik wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 24, 2022 7:54 am

Telefunkin wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 20, 2022 2:20 am

Here's one of several similar things that can give surprisingly convincing results (in a modern, artificial manner)...
https://emvoiceapp.com/
Although the straight voice clips are not too impressive, check out the song demo called "Last Town".

Thank you, I checked that out, and it is much more advanced than my EastWest "Hollywood Backup Singers". It's amazing how fast this technology advanced.

I had a quick look at the Emvoice link. It reminds me of a Yamaha Vocaloid-based product (Zero G's MIRIAM) that I reviewed for the now long-defunct CakewalkNet ezine way back in 2004 (http://rickpaulmusic.com/wp-content/upl ... review.pdf).

Vocaloid is still around (https://www.vocaloid.com/en/), and, from the looks and sounds of the video on their site, it has likely advanced considerably in the 18 years since my look. At that time, MIRIAM was a second generation product for Zero-G, and, while it was an improvement over their first generation products (LEON and LOLA), it really wasn't ready for primetime. I it for a pop song demo where I wanted a female voice, but it was pretty laughable. I'd actually started working on a Vocaloid review with the earlier LOLA ("virtual soul singer"), but it was even less ready for primetime. However, in the course of trying it out, I did actually end up using it on one of my recordings ("Undertow" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiK9KH5j-BI), just to double my background vocals. By the time I finished the recording, the old Vocaloid software could no longer work on my computer and operating system (and I wasn't interested in newer versions), but I'd rendered the parts to audio in an earlier demo, so I was still able to use them, blending them careful to minimize artifacts while still getting the extra richness from a "voice" different from mine. (Were I to want to do that today, though, I'd just play with formant and pitch shifting and other tweaks, using my own vocal and more modern plugins.)

Funnily enough, I've got an entry on a Vocaloid Fandom page (https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Make_Me_Feel) for another of my songs that I wrote with a Russian composer, Alexei Ustinov. He was really into the Vocaloid technology, doing some work with a Swedish company (PowerFX) that was putting out Vocaloid-based products, and he'd asked me about collaborating on a song (which turned into "Make Me Feel", which I later recorded as a duet with Beverly Bremers) for Vocaloids to sing (two versions of that are still on the net at http://www.jasminemusic.com/vocaloid/05-28-2007.htm). At one point, we were considering my doing a duet with a female Vocaloid, so I wrote it as a bit of an inside joke of a male human singing to a female robot (but trying to also make it work for a mature human couple).

PDebik wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 24, 2022 7:59 am

Thank you for these links, yes, that is about what I am seeking. My impression is, too, that vocals are more like synthesizers today. The singer is not really a singer, but a voice sample that the producer plays around with like playing notes on a keyboard. Someday someone might come up with a midi interface for humans, so that the producer plays a key on the keyboard and the larynx of the singer is electrically stimulated to produce the key that the producer pressed Terrible thought. But it seems that this is where things are developing to.

It depends on the genre, but I agree that, in some genres, vocals can be used like just about any other instrument. I think "vocal drops" are what you are referring to on your note on playing around with voice samples (there are plenty of sample libraries specifically for that purpose), be it from canned loops or vocal parts recorded specifically to be used in that context.

There are also some software instruments and sample libraries that you can make sing by just creating the MIDI parts and inputting the words you want it to say. Yamaha's Vocaloid technology has been around since at least 2004 (which is when I reviewed it -- see my notes in the bit about Emvoice above), and I've also tried (albeit without much success for actual words) the EastWest Symphonic Choirs, and their Hollywood Backup Singers looks pretty interesting.

In producer-driven music (e.g. a lot of hip-hop, EDM, etc.), there's a benefit to the producer to be able to produce whatever they want without having to rely on someone else's being available with the right thing at the right time. Then again, being mainly a keyboard player (in addition to being a singer, songwriter, and doing my own productions), I use virtual instruments, including virtual guitars, in a similar way.