Harmony Vocal plug in effects

[ANAYV]

Hi all.
New here.

I would like to hear from anyone who have good results with any harmony plug ins?

Specifically, I sing melody parts and want to create a few harmony backing vocals.
I dont hear harmony..and my mind keeps going back to the melody ...

I rarely know what key the songs I sing are in ( and I wrote and performed the music for them

Over the years, I used a few TC. Helicon Voice Prism, VoiceWorks/ Plus/ Voice One and Voice Live 3.

I do have Waves Harmony and Vox Guru, , but the little time I tried them, I didn't like the results. There is also a new plug in for vocals/ harmony called Altitude


It seems Artifacts are present with these type plug ins..similar to the older hardware I used to achieve this.

Any thoughts, suggestions on how to get decent harmony vocals?
Hardware, software?
A way to learn/ hear harmony?

Thanks!
ANAYV

[osiris]

Melda has a good one. Two actually. I think Harmonizer and Ensemble are the names. I also had good results with Zplane Vielkling 2.

[Andreya_Autumn]

Some degree of "artificial-ness" is always present with these indeed. Maybe you like that, in which any of the ones mentioned should be fine. Or Izotope Vocalsynth, whatever the Antares one is called again, etc etc...

If you want to minimize that Imogen Heap sound in favor of something more acoustic sounding, nothing beats actually tracking all the harmony parts for real. Absent that possibility, I guess try things and see what you like. The new Klevgränd one you mentioned should have a demo at least. Perhaps some of the others do as well.

[ANAYV]

Melda has a good one. Two actually. I think Harmonizer and Ensemble are the names. I also had good results with Zplane Vielkling 2.

Thanks.
I will check these out.

[ANAYV]

Some degree of "artificial-ness" is always present with these indeed. Maybe you like that, in which any of the ones mentioned should be fine. Or Izotope Vocalsynth, whatever the Antares one is called again, etc etc...

If you want to minimize that Imogen Heap sound in favor of something more acoustic sounding, nothing beats actually tracking all the harmony parts for real. Absent that possibility, I guess try things and see what you like. The new Klevgränd one you mentioned should have a demo at least. Perhaps some of the others do as well.

Not in favor of the artifacts.
Also not going for any Auto Tune type of dound.
Actually I dont use any pitch correction on purpose.

Some Vocal plug ins I have use has some form of it.

Rather leave the slight imperfections in.

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

I can only do octave..but thats not real harmony:(

Thanks

[kerfuffle]

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

It's pretty straightforward: Figure out what the chords are, then sing the other notes from these chords at the same time as the main melody.

[osiris]

The Zplane one is a Pitch Editor, but there's an option to layer harmonies on top of it. I've used it, works pretty well (as long as you leave the audio alone). It's very easy to knock audio out of alignment.
I wish we'd had this back in the day. I had the studio acapella of DM - World In My Eyes, that was just Gahan solo, and I wouldn't remix it because it didn't sound right without those harmonies and I think an (very expensive) Antares plugin was the ONLY pluggy that could do half decent harmony. I ended up tossing the acapella I really regret that.

[ANAYV]

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

It's pretty straightforward: Figure out what the chords are, then sing the other notes from these chords at the same time as the main melody.

Thanks..I put sometime in and figure this out.
3 notes....it cant be too hard..but then again it's me

[hey212]

You can get pretty natural sounding harmonies with Melodyne, but it's a bit more manual editing. For simple plug and play harmonies, Eventide Octavox/Quadravox are pretty good.

[Andreya_Autumn]

Some degree of "artificial-ness" is always present with these indeed. Maybe you like that, in which any of the ones mentioned should be fine. Or Izotope Vocalsynth, whatever the Antares one is called again, etc etc...

If you want to minimize that Imogen Heap sound in favor of something more acoustic sounding, nothing beats actually tracking all the harmony parts for real. Absent that possibility, I guess try things and see what you like. The new Klevgränd one you mentioned should have a demo at least. Perhaps some of the others do as well.

Not in favor of the artifacts.
Also not going for any Auto Tune type of dound.
Actually I dont use any pitch correction on purpose.

Some Vocal plug ins I have use has some form of it.

Rather leave the slight imperfections in.

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

I can only do octave..but thats not real harmony:(

Thanks

Right. Then I would suggest rather than solving this with a plugin, get a music theory 101 workbook and start learning the ropes. You can also find some good learning material online, but that stuff can be of varying quality. It will be a learning process and will take you a bit longer to get results, but you will be happier for it eventually. And the process can be fun too, experiment etc etc...

The basics that you need to learn are how to follow the melody in parallel. Stay inside the same scale the melody uses, and trace the movements of the melody either a 3rd up/down or a 6th up/down. Whether to use a 3rd or a 6th, and whether to go above or below, will be a matter of taste and differ depending on the melody. No single answer there, you'd just try things out.

The nuance is, sometimes you break the strict parallell 3rds pattern to fit with the chords. Say for example you're in C major, and a melody phrase ends on the C chord. If the melody notes are E-D-C, then a 3rd down from there would be C-B-A. But in that situation many of us often choose to land on G instead, to end on an in-chord note.

Of course, depending on the style you're into, your aesthetic goals, etc etc... you may want to sometimes use other more flavorful intervals than just 3rd/6th. Described above is just the basic style used across lots of pop/rock/folk/country/etc styles.

If you don't know what a 3rd or a 6th is, that's what you need the basic music theory workbook for. Or again, you can look up "musical interval training" online and see what you find.

If you do go down this path, remember that as always with music theory and audiation stuff: these are not "rules" that say what you should and shouldn't do. It is just a language you learn to help your brain make sense of what you hear.

[Andreya_Autumn]

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

It's pretty straightforward: Figure out what the chords are, then sing the other notes from these chords at the same time as the main melody.

Thanks..I put sometime in and figure this out.
3 notes....it cant be too hard..but then again it's me

Yeah this is good advice too. Keeping it simple. For "ooooh" type of background harmony, this is all you need. If you want harmony that tracks the melody, well the melody (usually) won't always be on a chord note, so you need a plan for the in-between notes. Which is what I outlined above. But yeah the basics really aren't that bad. If you can sing melody in tune, you can learn to sing harmony I'm sure.

[Andreya_Autumn]

Oh, and here's a thought. The auto-harmonizing plugins/pedals etc are programmed to follow the patterns I outlined above. So what you could do is:
- Get one of those plugins
- Use it to generate one or more harmony parts
- Separate/solo one of those
- Listen to that and sing along, learning the harmony part the plugins came up with
- Re-record it with your own voice

If you couple that with some musical interval learning etc, you may get the best of both worlds. You'll be getting results quicker than if you just started learning unassisted, but you will be developing the musical understanding not just getting the results!

[osiris]

That's one thing I like about the Melda ones, they have separate volume and pitch parameters for each additional voice.

[ANAYV]

You can get pretty natural sounding harmonies with Melodyne, but it's a bit more manual editing. For simple plug and play harmonies, Eventide Octavox/Quadravox are pretty good.

I do have Melodyne..but didnt get too far.

I might have that Eventide..have to check
Thanks

[ANAYV]

Some degree of "artificial-ness" is always present with these indeed. Maybe you like that, in which any of the ones mentioned should be fine. Or Izotope Vocalsynth, whatever the Antares one is called again, etc etc...

If you want to minimize that Imogen Heap sound in favor of something more acoustic sounding, nothing beats actually tracking all the harmony parts for real. Absent that possibility, I guess try things and see what you like. The new Klevgränd one you mentioned should have a demo at least. Perhaps some of the others do as well.

Not in favor of the artifacts.
Also not going for any Auto Tune type of dound.
Actually I dont use any pitch correction on purpose.

Some Vocal plug ins I have use has some form of it.

Rather leave the slight imperfections in.

If I could hear proper Harmonies for the lead parts I record, then I would just sing those on other tracks.

I can only do octave..but thats not real harmony:(

Thanks

Right. Then I would suggest rather than solving this with a plugin, get a music theory 101 workbook and start learning the ropes. You can also find some good learning material online, but that stuff can be of varying quality. It will be a learning process and will take you a bit longer to get results, but you will be happier for it eventually. And the process can be fun too, experiment etc etc...

The basics that you need to learn are how to follow the melody in parallel. Stay inside the same scale the melody uses, and trace the movements of the melody either a 3rd up/down or a 6th up/down. Whether to use a 3rd or a 6th, and whether to go above or below, will be a matter of taste and differ depending on the melody. No single answer there, you'd just try things out.

The nuance is, sometimes you break the strict parallell 3rds pattern to fit with the chords. Say for example you're in C major, and a melody phrase ends on the C chord. If the melody notes are E-D-C, then a 3rd down from there would be C-B-A. But in that situation many of us often choose to land on G instead, to end on an in-chord note.

Of course, depending on the style you're into, your aesthetic goals, etc etc... you may want to sometimes use other more flavorful intervals than just 3rd/6th. Described above is just the basic style used across lots of pop/rock/folk/country/etc styles.

If you don't know what a 3rd or a 6th is, that's what you need the basic music theory workbook for. Or again, you can look up "musical interval training" online and see what you find.

If you do go down this path, remember that as always with music theory and audiation stuff: these are not "rules" that say what you should and shouldn't do. It is just a language you learn to help your brain make sense of what you hear.

Thanks for this lengthy answer!

Indeed this will give me the best results...and I would learn in the process
Let's see if I can get this 3rd/ 5th/6th and be in sync with the melody lines.

As you said, some notes may clash, and then a different note would be sung at those points.

Good food for thought. I copied this..so I can go over it again.
Thanks again!!