ANTARES HARMONY ENGINE 1.0
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, BY DOUG EISENGREIN
Be Your Own Backup Singer With This Five-Voice Plug-In
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Antares, creator of one of the oldest and most recognizable tricks in the DSP plug-in book, Auto-Tune, and the more recent and enigmatic AVOX vocal processing bundle, is playing the pitch-manipulation game again with Harmony Engine. Having positively reviewed the utilitarian-to-outrageous AVOX in the January 2006 issue of Remix, I was keen to try the California-based company's latest offering. Harmony Engine is a five-voice vocal harmony-generating plug-in for Mac OS X and Windows XP or Vista that works under a variety of DAW hosts. The generated vocal quintet includes the source as well as four individual harmony voices, each with a variety of independent controls such as gain and pan, vibrato, “throat length” and plenty more.
WARM-UP EXERCISES
I downloaded the software from Antares' Website, where the company offers 10-day, fully functional demo versions of most of its current software line. The download screen lists individual links for each of the available plug-in formats. That makes for smaller downloads and minimized client hard-drive requirements at the potential expense of multiple installers for users of different hosts. I like this approach, and Antares assists with a description of each of the major plug-in format types.
I tested Harmony Engine on a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, running Apple Logic Pro 7. I downloaded the 15 MB Audio Units Universal Binary version, which comes with support files and a well-illustrated 48-page PDF manual. The installation was a simple and quick affair; the installer tells you exactly which files will be placed where on your computer — a rare and nice touch, at least on a Mac. On first try, however, Logic didn't recognize Harmony Engine despite the documentation's assertion that Logic 7 is “fully supported.” Antares tech support was very helpful and thorough in its directions. Upon updating to Logic version 7.1.1, the plug-in was recognized — problem solved. Harmony Engine uses the increasingly common iLok system for authorization, which was as straightforward as the install. The scheme uses a single dongle that authorizes multiple software programs.
Harmony Engine 1.0 can route or export its five channels to individual DAW tracks for further processing. Antares suspects that factor has caused some incompatibility problems with some DAWs that don't support that function, but Antares is working to make sure hosts will simply disable that one function, rather than refuse Harmony Engine as an available plug-in. At the time of this writing, Logic was the only fully supported Audio Units host; Digital Performer 5 was listed as “partially supported” (no automation); and Steinberg Cubase SX 3.1/4, Nuendo 3.1/4, Wavelab 6 and Cakewalk Sonar 6.2 are all fully supported. On the other hand, Ableton Live 5/6, Bias Peak Pro, Adobe Audition and all Sony apps, including Acid, Sound Forge and Vegas were not yet listed as supported. Another noticeable omission is a TDM version, though RTAS is available for Pro Tools 7.x systems.
Once you clear the hurdle of owning a compatible host, Harmony Engine's interface looks clean, well-labeled and modern; all controls conveniently exist in a single window, and each of the five harmony voices is well laid out in channel-strip fashion. All voices (“channels”) have the following features in common: a linear Gain fader, a horizontal Pan fader, continuous level meters and Solo and Mute buttons (which come in very handy as you custom-sculpt your sound). The four harmony-generating channels have the remainder of their controls in common, including Interval (plus/minus 5th, 3rd, semitones, etc.), a physically modeled Throat Length presented on a vertical pot and four Vibrato controls, including Rate, Onset Delay, Pitch Amount and Amp Amount. Replacing the Vibrato section, the source channel contains drop-down menus for Input Vocal Range (Soprano, Alto/Tenor, Baritone/Bass, Instrument) and Model Glottal (Soft, Medium, Loud, Intense). The source channel also has a linear pot for Tracking; combined with the Vocal range controls, that enables you to best match and clone the source.
Global controls include various Humanize, Glide, Formant and Pitch Freeze components and a wide variety of harmony controls, including Key/Root, Scale, Harmony Source and more. Finally, MIDI controls and fully customizable Harmony and Voice Parameter Preset matrices are onboard for saving custom settings. One begins to see pretty quickly that Harmony Engine goes well beyond most automatic harmonic generators; while it's feasible to do something as simple as call up an instance of the plug-in and just let it fly, each of the harmonic voices can be micro-controlled: Choose a harmonic interval or fixed interval above or below the source, fine-tune the pitch, subtly enhance or subtract vibrato and alter the vibrato rate, etc. However, I also quickly discovered that using Harmony Engine out of the box was not adequate. To get a good sound, Harmony Engine absolutely requires tweaking.
Read more of the Remix review of the Antares Harmony Engine 1.0
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