The process of creating vocal chains to achieve modern vocal ear candy can be time-consuming and often hit-or-miss. It could be that you need one extra plugin to change the formant, perhaps you need a tuning plugin with more advanced features, or maybe you need a plugin that's capable of creating vocal synth effects. What if there was one plugin that could do it all?

Achieving The Vocoder Effect

The Vocoder is a musical instrument that analyses and synthesizes the human voice. Invented in 1938 by Homer Dudley, it has been widely used by the likes of Daft Punk, Imogen Heap, and many more. The issue with vocoders is they're quite tricky to program, given their complexity and range of timbral variations.

Antares Vocodist delivers the legendary sound of 20 vintage vocoders with the full force and flexibility of Auto-Tune built-in. Upon loading Vocodist, you want to decide if you're using it as an and audio insert or on a MIDI channel in pitch track mode.

In this video, I'm using Vocodist in MIDI pitch track mode with the Barkhausen model and blending in the original vocal to taste. You can also automate and blend two parameters using the X-Y pad. On this vocal, I'm modulating the spread and voice mix. In the top bar, you can activate Auto-Tune and then take further control with the voice section at the top of the left column.

Creating Great Vocal Chops

By this point, just about every producer of this decade is familiar with 'vocal chops'. Vocal chops tend to be the ear candy that defines the peak energy, with a repetitive and often formant style vocal. There are several ways to create vocal chops, but the road to creating them can be a long and often monotonous process of eq, pitch shifting, time stretching and even mapping to MIDI.

Antares Slice is almost two plugins in one. A hybrid between a sampler and a playable synthesizer. It allows users to be able to map vocals to keys and play them like instruments. Slice boasts a stunning selection of presets with its artist exclusive sample packs. These are a great starting point if you don't' have any material of your own to work with.

If you want to work with your own source material, you simply drag the audio into Slice's edit timeline, and it automatically maps and creates start and end markers for individual phrases, leaving behind the tiresome chore of quite literally chopping up vocals. Then by zooming into the timeline, you can refine the vocal chops to taste and modify their pitch and amp envelopes using the ADSR controls.

If you want to get really creative, you can even change the playback mode from forward right through to reverse looping. The formant and throat controls are where most users will want to focus their energy. By altering the throat value, you can completely change the timbre of the vocal.

Final Thoughts

Both of these plugins sound absolutely fantastic. They boast a tremendous selection of features and controls and consider that vocal processing can be daunting, providing users with great presets for both the Vocodist and Slice. If vocals are your thing, these are two indispensable tools that are well worth having in your plugin folder.