Altering Pitch Shifts: The Beneficial Application on Every Vocal Recording Sample
Transforming the Tone of Your Music: A Crash Course on Formant Shifting
Welcome, music enthusiasts! Today, we're diving deep into the enchanting world of formant shifting. Get ready to add some exhilaration to your tracks and take your productions to new heights!
This guide will teach you:
- The jist of formant shifting
- How it works like a charm under the hood
- When to use formant shifting in your tracks, not just for vocals (👀)!
- Top-tier free and fabulous paid plugins to get you started 💥 today!
Let's do this! 👇
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Claim Your FREE EDM Starter Kit## Table of Contents
- Formant Shifting: What's the Scoop? 🧐
- Harmonics and Formants
- Formant Shifting: The rundown
- Formant Shifting: Putting it to Practice
- When to Employ Formant Shifting
- Creative Layering
- Delay with a Twist
- Realistic Autotuning
- Experimenting with Formant Shifting: The new and innovative!
- The Cream of the Crop: Formant Shifting Plugins
- MeldaProduction's MAutoPitch - The Freebie Wonder 💰
- The Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy - The Party Starter 🎉
- Antares' Throat - The Maestro
- Celemony's Melodyne - The Conductor
- That's All, Folks! Your Guide on Formant Shifting!
Formant Shifting: What's the Scoop? 🧐
Before we dive deeper into formant shifting, let's first understand what formants are.
Harmonics and Formants
Wikipedia defines a formant as "the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract" - a bit too much to digest at first, so let's break it down.
Simply put, imagine formants as the timbre, or the unique tone, of a sound. Take, for example, the difference between a piano and a guitar playing the exact same note. Both have the same pitch, but they 'sound' distinct. This difference is due to the concept of harmonics - more on that later!
Formant Shifting: The rundown
Formant shifting is similar to altering the timbre of a voice. Both a male and female voice can sing the same note, yet they sound markedly different. This discrepancy is due to the harmonics involved and their relative volume.
With formant shifting, we're manipulating the harmonics in an ascending or descending direction, but the fundamental remains the same. The result is a change in the tone of the vocal, without altering the actual notes. Here's a simple example:
The pitch remains the same, but the vocal quality has shifted. In these examples, I used Little AlterBoy by Soundtoys - read more about it later!
Formant Shifting: Putting it to Practice
Now that we better understand formant shifting, let's learn how to utilize it.
All formant shifting plugins will have a primary knob you can adjust: normally ranging from -12 semitones to +12 semitones. However, remember that we're not altering the pitch here:
Some plugins may offer additional controls:
- Dry/Wet: adjusts the balance between the unprocessed and processed vocals.
- Width: adds stereo widening by detuning and panning two copies to increase the spatial impact.
- Advanced controls for special vocal performances (e.g., soprano, tenor, etc.), depending on the plugin.
When to Employ Formant Shifting
When should you use formant shifting?
The most obvious example is to customize a sample you found online. Check out our complete guide on processing samples creatively. However, there are a myriad of other ways to employ this cool effect. Take a look 👇
Creative Layering
You can also transform the depth of your vocals with formant shifting, especially background vocals.Layering formant-shifted vocals works especially well on background vocals but don't hesitate to add a subtle, formant-shifted layer to your lead vocals. If your vocal feels a tad thin, consider adding one or two layers, perhaps shifting one layer up and the other down.
Try parallel processing for best results:
On the wet channel, set your formant shifting to 100% wet. Adjust the EQ, compression, and reverb for that layer individually.
Delay... with a Twist
We all appreciate a good delay on our vocals! Why not enliven the effect with a bit of formant shifting?Place your delay on a send or parallel channel, adjust the formant shifting, and experiment with different delay periods!
Here's an example with these settings:
- Formant shifting at -7 semitones
- Delay set at a 1/2 note
- Low-frequency roll-off with EQ
Realistic Autotuning
Does tuning a vocal performance sometimes feel like a challenge? Formant shifting will help you achieve a more natural tone!
This is because altering the pitch up or down not just changes the pitch but also the entire harmonic content. When you go beyond a few semitones, the resulting sound is often referred to as the "chipmunk" effect.
To remedy this, experiment with downward formant shifting, which helps remove high harmonics introduced by the pitch shifting, making the result sound more natural.
Creative Uses of Formant Shifting
The fun doesn't stop at vocals! Experiment with formant shifting on other sounds, too!
Automating the effect creates exciting transitions:
The Cream of the Crop: Formant Shifting Plugins
To round things off, let's explore some outstanding choices for formant shifting plugins.
MeldaProduction's MAutoPitch: The Freebie Wonder 💰
We've talked about MeldaProduction before, notably in our free plugins list.
Among its suite of free plugins, MAutoPitch stands out as a fantastic free auto-tune alternative:
Its attributes include:
- Scale tracking: automatically corrects any note to a specified scale
- Depth and speed: control the speed and precision of the auto-tuning effect
- Formant shifting, complete with dry/wet control and stereo widening
For zero dollars spent, you can't find better options out there!
**Download MAutoPitch Here****
The Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy: The Party Starter 🎉
Just like the name suggests, Little AlterBoy is a standout plugin, and we're big fans.
It not only sounds fantastic, but it also offers a ton of presets, especially geared towards vocal doubling.
In addition to its versatility, several interesting features make it an appealing choice, like:
- Linking the pitch and formant shifting effects
- Three different modes: Transpose, Quantize, and Robot
To learn more about Little AlterBoy, check out our favorite Soundtoys plugins list here.
Antares' Throat: The Maestro
Antares is the company behind the original Auto-Tune plugin. They boast a lineup of plugins tailored to manipulating the human voice, including Throat.
Throat leaps ahead of similar plugins with unparalleled control over up to 5 different aspects of the human voice:
- Vocal cords
- Throat
- Mouth
- Lips
This allows you to create incredibly precise vocal output!
**Check out Throat Here****
Celemony's Melodyne: The Conductor
Despite its outdated UI, Melodyne remains the gold standard for audio correction. No other tool offers the degree of detail and precise correction of every syllable in a vocal performance.
With Melodyne, formant shifting is merely one of numerous options you have. With Melodyne, you can alter the timing, pitch, volume, formant, and more – syllable by syllable!
If you're aiming for a transparently corrected vocal performance, Melodyne is the way to go!
**Download Melodyne Here****
Gear Up for Your Music-Making Adventure with Our EDM Starter Kit 🎛️
Join us in unlocking your full potential with our collection of top-notch presets, samples, and study guides - tailored for various electronic music genres 👇
Claim Your FREE EDM Starter Kit## That's All, Folks! Your Guide on Formant Shifting!
We've covered the basics of formant shifting in this guide, giving you ideas on why and how to use formant shifting in your tracks.
Did you find something we missed? What are your favorite formant shifting plugins? Let us know at [email protected]!
Happy music-making! 😄🎶
- Elevate your electronic music productions by incorporating the unique qualities of gadgets and technology. Explore the use of top-notch presets, samples, and study guides from our EDM Starter Kit, designed to cater to a variety of electronic music genres.
- To create an enticing atmosphere, consider experimenting with music and entertainment by experimenting with innovative techniques like formant shifting. As demonstrated in our guide, this technology alters the timbre of sounds without changing the fundamental pitch, offering plenty of room for creativity and exploration.
