Antares Audio Technologies has announced the availability of Harmony Engine Evo Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator, the next generation of the easy-to-use tool for vocal harmony creation.

Building on the power and ease of use of the original Harmony Engine, Harmony Engine Evo incorporates Antares' Evo Voice Processing Technology for faster, more accurate pitch detection, smoother, artifact-free pitch shifting, and seamless, natural-sounding throat modeling. And with the addition of 5 channels of Antares' unique Choir Vocal Multiplier, Harmony Engine Evo allows the creation of huge vocal ensembles from a single vocal line.

With four independent harmony voices, a variety of powerful harmony generating modes, humanization features for natural sounding performances, and a flexible real-time preset system for harmony and vocal type, Harmony Engine Evo provides easy-to-use tools to quickly and easily produce virtually any vocal arrangement one can imagine.

Key Harmony Engine Evo features include:

• Antares' Evo Voice Processing Technology for faster, more accurate pitch detection and smoother, artifact-free pitch shifting.
• Four high-quality, formant-corrected harmony voices with independent vocal character, vibrato and pan settings.
• Five channels of Antares' unique Choir Vocal Multiplier, which can turn each voice into 2, 4, or 8 individual unison voices, perfect for creating choirs out of a single vocal line.
• Antares Throat Modeling technology that processes each harmony voice through a physical model of the human vocal tract.
• A variety of innovative Harmony Control modes, from fully automatic to individual control of every note:
  • Fixed or Scale Intervals - Simply set the key and harmony voice intervals and let Harmony Engine do the rest.
  • Scale Degree or Chord Name - Define harmony chord-by-chord, complete with inversions and variable vocal ranges.
  • Chord by MIDI - Define harmony in real time via a MIDI controller or pre-recorded MIDI track.
  • MIDI Omni - Directly "play" the four harmony voices as if they were voices of a synth or sampler.
  • MIDI Channel - Use four separate MIDI channels for absolute control over each note of a vocal arrangement.
• Spread and Register controls that allow a musician to quickly and intuitively set the pitch range and harmony style of their vocal arrangement.
• Humanize functions that provide selectable amounts of variation to each harmony voice for realistic, natural sounding results.
• A Freeze function that allows a unique variety of backup vocal effects by making it possible to instantly freeze pitch and/or formant articulation at any point.
• A Harmony Preset matrix that allows the creation of up to 15 complete harmony settings and the ability to instantaneously recall them, in real time or via automation.
• A Voice Parameter Preset matrix that allows the creation and instantly recall up to 6 different "vocal groups".
• Five-channel output capability (host dependent) that makes it possible to assign or export the original input and each of the four harmony voices to their own channels for further processing.

"With the original Harmony Engine, we set ourselves the task of creating a tool that would let anyone who could hear the harmonies they wanted in their mind quickly and easily create those harmonies in a song or other project," said Marco Alpert, Antares VP of Marketing. "When we developed Evo Voice Processing Technology for the latest version of Auto-Tune, we immediately realized that it could also substantially enhance the performance of Harmony Engine, so we set about reworking the core algorithms to incorporate it."

"Additionally, we all loved the result of assigning instances of Choir to individual Harmony Engine voices to create large vocal groups, but we were frustrated by the complexity of configuring most DAWs to allow it. So integrating five channels of Choir into Harmony Engine Evo was a proverbial no-brainer. With Harmony Engine Evo, huge vocal ensembles are only a few simple button presses away."

Pricing & Availability

Harmony Engine Evo is available for Windows and Mac OS X in VST, AU and RTAS plug-in formats at a U.S. MSRP of $249. All Mac OS X versions are Universal Binaries. Windows versions are XP and Vista compatible.

Upgrades to Harmony Engine Evo are available for purchase and download by current registered owners of the original Harmony Engine.

More Harmony Engine Evo information and a fully functional time-limited demo version are available at the Antares web site: http://www.antarestech.com