The Most Overlooked Vocal Production Tool

Do you ever wish that you could change the timbre of a voice, make it sound a little bit younger or maybe a little bit older?

Or make it sound like maybe the singer is smoked too many cigarettes, maybe inhaled a little bit of helium?

There's a tool in Melodyne that gets overlooked in a lot of tutorials, and it's the formant tool. And I'm going to jump right into this and play a bit of this vocal. And this is just a scratch a song that just a scratch vocal and track that we're working on. So it's not fully produced or anything, but just pay attention to the vocal here.

[Plays music]

So this thing has got a really cool tamper tour voice already and she's kind of got this like, I feel like a low end kind of grittiness to her voice, which is really cool. So normally I wouldn't use this on her voice unless I was going for something that was really interesting and different, which is what I'm going to try and do in this pre-chorus section right here. So this busier section that happens right here,

[Plays music]

I'm going to pull up the formant tool, which is this little tab right here. And all you've got to do is just hover over it, click, go in, click, drag up or down. I'm going to put it back and I'm going to manipulate it as it's playing so you can hear what it does.

[Plays music]

So I'm sure you've heard this kind of voice manipulation a lot in pop songs, especially on the echoes of phrases. So they'll have a phrase like in the normal vocal timbre and then they'll, they'll have it like echo with the formant kind of way up or way down. It's a really cool technique. And I feel like if you, if you go extreme, you know, it can sound like you're, you've got helium in your voice or the other way.

But what I have liked to do when I'm not trying to go for something extreme is just manipulate it just a little bit. Especially like if you've got a voice that sounds a little bit younger and you want it to sound more mature or vice versa, you've got a voice that sounds a little bit too mature, too old, and you want to bring some youthful elements back. I just bring the formant up just a little bit and you can make it sound like a more youthful voice.

So listen here. So this is gonna start a regular, non-affected.

[Plays music]

So I would find the sweet spot in there, but you can, you can get just a little bit of more useful sound in there. And then here, if I wanted to make her sound a little bit more mature. She's already got a low end kind of great, like I said to her voice. So this might not illustrate it the best, but you could bring it down..

[Plays music]

So those are the ways that I like to play around with this formant tool.

Experiment. See what you can do with it. 🤗

xxx - Josh