Search: Up-to-date, simple Vocal Harmonizer VSTi? What's out there?

[Tobi MM]

So, after another horrible band practice with a TC Helicon Perform VK, i'd love to burn that thing and move the vocal tasks into the already used DAW... but i have no idea where to start.

what i need: something simple that works realtime and makes two/three/four-voice choirs of my vocals, to the chords i play (with midi track / in realtime). pitch correction would be nice also.

what i don't need: iLok and a GUI that 'forces' thousands of options on you (just need the ones mentioned above).

Any Idea?

[Dirtgrain]

Melda's Harmonizer, maybe.

Edit: I just opened it, and it isn't the fastest to use give the GUI options.

[Andreya_Autumn]

So, after another horrible band practice with a TC Helicon Perform VK, i'd love to burn that thing and move the vocal tasks into the already used DAW... but i have no idea where to start.

what i need: something simple that works realtime and makes two/three/four-voice choirs of my vocals, to the chords i play (with midi track / in realtime). pitch correction would be nice also.

what i don't need: iLok and a GUI that 'forces' thousands of options on you (just need the ones mentioned above).

Any Idea?

The kicker here is the "to the chords I play" part of the sentence.

If you mean "I send it a piano/guitar signal, it detects that I'm playing a G major and uses the appropriate notes to generate harmony. Then I got nothing.

If you mean "I'm gonna send it MIDI notes corresponding to the vocal harmonies I want" then I got a couple suggestions:

iZotope vocalsynth has a mode that works this way (it can also harmonize in key but not follow chords). It's a fair bet to guess that it won't be maintained forever, going by Izotopes previous patterns. But it is fairly up to date. Comes in multiple formats, is M1 native etc etc. Izotope really want you to install their bloatware installation manager or whatever, but at least when I last checked you could still get a regular installer .dmg if you can figure out where to find it on their website. Some hassle there, sure. But to compensate the plugin is easy to use, has pitch correction, and does sound great.

Madrona Labs Virta. It sounds fantastic in 256-band vocoder mode. No iLok or other bloatware. Downsides: 4-voice poly max, not exactly easy to use. Happy to share patches if you want though.

Good luck!

[Tobi MM]

If you mean "I'm gonna send it MIDI notes corresponding to the vocal harmonies I want" then I got a couple suggestions:

it's basically this. give me exactly the notes i play (midi)

i've done some tests with nektar 3 demo and it looks like it could work... maybe vocalsynth bundle while they have the holiday-sale...

[Andreya_Autumn]

IDK what the price is right now, but I got VocalSynth 2 on sale and that has felt very worthwhile. I basically only ever use the Imogen Heap-style "polyvox" module, which is the least tweakable in some ways. But it's also probably the best sounding version of that idea that's out there. Sounds like pitch-shifted copies, rather than a vocoder. I'm guessing this is the one you want.

Antares have Harmony Engine,which you probably don't want anyway since it's bloatware+CodeMeter enabled, and even if that weren't the case I honestly wasn't that impressed with its sound. Many parameters in there, so maybe it can be tweaked to sound better. VocalSynth-Polyvox on the other hand basically sounds good with the dials at noon. Make sure you choose the right one out of the low/mid/high detection setting over the pitch correction controls to the left. Those have a big impact on the overall sound.

I'm you can't pan individual voices, but there are some stereo fx. I split it up into single-voice instances anyway for microtuning reasons, and that way you can pan each voice to a different place for a nice stereo image.

And yeah, the Melda thing is no bloatware/iLok/etc though. And does sound very good too. If you're ok with the Melda UIs, that's a good option too.