I'm new to the forum but I have been in digital audio production privately for several years.
I have been pulling my hair out looking for a VST that can do formant shifting (NOT talking about vowel changing, but Melodyne style formant shifting) and I figured I'd give up. I see all those awesome voice effects like Steinberg Voice Machine where you just play keys and it changes your voice to that pitch with formant preservation, but they're so freakin expensive.
But then I decided, why not try and make my own?
Since VSTs like these normally cost like $300+ I thought I would give this out as freeware. Short Factor presents a freeware midi keyboard controlled pitch changer with formant shifting, or I just call it "The Vocal Keyboard". Its actually just the MDA Talkbox with a smoothed saw as the carrier. The input is automatically panned left as the modulator so it also acts as an "Instant Vocoder" effect. However, I added a formant shifter. Cool thing about it is, it sounds much nicer than the usual FFT/Melodyne-ish buzzy annoying formant crap. I call it "sweet formant". You'll just have to listen to it to see what I mean.
I give this out for free because I know people have been looking for this stuff. I hope this helps a lot. As a side note, this is just for fun, I have a good singing voice and I don't need to rely on autotuners to sing good.
Alright, here it is:
Update 1: Organized the interface a bit better and added a "Noise Compensator" with "Amount" and "Hi Pass" sliders, thanks to xoxos's recommendation.
The Vocal Keyboard VST
Credit to the awesome folks who made the MDA VSTs. I embedded two of them in this VST. This can be used for commercial purposes TO MY KNOWLEDGE. I am NOT certain on this but I think it can. It just depends on if the MDA VSTs can or not.
Current features include:
ADSR Envelope per key press.
Input Volume and Total Volume controls.
LFO Rate, Depth, and Attack.
Filter Cutoff and Resonance for either Lowpass, Bandpass, or Highpass.
Switch for pitch to shift to the key being pressed or to be tracked naturally (the latter being very glitchy right now because I used the MDA Tracker, but I will eventually make my own that handles noise better).
Monophonic Mode for legato effects with slide time adjust.
Formant shifter, with two modes; slider for manual formant adjustment or keyboard formant control.
And that's it so far. I'm putting this up here so I can get suggestions for more features that I can implement in it. Thoughts? Criticism? Ideas? Please, asking for help.
Thanks in advance for any support.


