Baby Audio’s new Humanoid plugin promises “extreme hard tuning” and vocal transformation.
Originally designed to correct pitchy vocals as transparently as possible, automatic tuning plugins are now just as frequently used as extreme, creative effects.
So, now Humanoid, Baby Audio has dispensed with the idea of creating a ‘natural’ sounding processor and built something that specializes in hard tuning and freaky robotic voice manipulation.
The Pitch section enables you to set a scale to which your vocals will be tuned. There’s also a Note mode that gives you the option of setting the desired pitch manually by clicking on a graphical musical keyboard, or you can ‘play’ Humanoid from your MIDI keyboard.
It’s over in the Synthesize section that things get a little more unhinged. Push the Transform dial to the max and your voice will be turned into – the sound of a synthesizer. More moderate settings will add a more subtle electronic flavour.
There are 64 factory wavetables and you can also import your own, meaning that there’s plenty of scope for tonal variation.
Further processing can be applied via the Filter and Effects sections. The former features high- and low-pass filters plus a sweepable mid band, while the latter offers widening, vibrato and stutter effects.
Humanoid runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats. Its regular price is $129, but you can currently purchase it for $79. There is also a free trial, which you can download from the Baby Audio website.
Tasty Chips shared this video demo of their GR-MEGA Granular Workstation – a granular hardware synthesizer, sampler, effect, sequencer, and spectral time stretcher.
They describe it as “a sound design powerhouse, our top model, and the culmination of the journey we started 8 years ago with the GR-1: the world’s first real granular hardware synth.”
The GR-MEGA is a sample-based device. Record audio with the built-in inputs, and then you can granulate your source samples.
The GR-MEGA is 4 layer multitimbral, and massively polyphonic, and has a wide choice of engines ranging from a traditional sampler with slicing, to a spectral phase vocoder and granular. It’s capable of 128 grains per voice, which can add up to a total of 5000 grains simultaneously.
Host Nick Batt – in his latest Sonic LAB video – takes an in-depth look at the new Arturia PolyBrute 12 synthesizer, the flagship of their hardware synth line.
The Arturia Polybrute 12 takes their Brute line to new level, pairing their expressive FullTouch keyboard with a powerful 12-voice architecture, and adding a ribbon controller, Morphée pad, bi-timbral morphing presets and more.
Batt says that the PolyBrute 12 “doesn’t disappoint” and “is a very impressive instrument”.
View the review, and then share your thoughts on the PolyBrute 12 in the comments!
