Waves Harmony is a “real-time vocal harmony playground” that can generate up to eight voices from a signal
The plug-in’s harmonies can also be played manually via MIDI, offering plentiful live applications.
Image: Waves
Waves has unveiled a new plug-in designed to create complex vocal harmonies and chords from single vocal lines. Harmony can generate up to eight additional voices from a single stimulus, with adjustable pitch, formant, panning, delay, filtering and modulation for each individual voice.
“Take a solo vocal, and immediately surround it with epic multi-part harmonies, spread among low and high, male and female (yes, you can transform any voice),” light and heavy,” says Waves. “In seconds, audition Kanye, Jacob Collier, Ty Dolla $ign and Imogen Heap-style sounds in your song. Better yet – perform them live in real-time […] Harmony creates drama to suit a multitude of musical genres: pop, hip hop, R&B, rock, country, folk, and many more.”
The plug-in can also generate chords automatically with Chord Presets, which offers characterful, mood-based voicings complete with colourfully evocative names like ‘Gin Joint’, ‘Fanfare’, ‘Jazzy Cluster’ and ‘Divine Trio’. This is alongside the option to behave like a more conventional vocoder, with MIDI control allowing backing vocal parts to be played chromatically in real time— in the studio or onstage.
The plug-in offers three workflow options: Automatic mode instantly creates harmonies on a vocal, presenting a bank of chord presets for instant generation of harmonies. Playable MIDI mode expects a MIDI keyboard for live-playing of notes and chords. This mode also has adjustable key and scale settings, with the capacity to map a chosen scale to the keyboard so that anything played sounds musical and makes sense in the context of a given key. Graphical mode presents a visual display, where users can click to ‘draw’ harmonies— including arrange, tune, formant shift, delay, filter and pan— and adjust section-to-section using a system of snapshots.
Take a look at the video introduction below:
Waves Harmony is available now for macOS and Windows in VST, AU and AAX formats for an introductory price of $39.99, after which it’ll retail for $149. For more, visit waves.com.
