Vocal Artifacts Caused by Transposing

[biohacker_ellie]

Hi all! I'm working on a new track which involves me singing for once. I'm a trans artist so I dont usually sing because my voice is pretty masc but I found a cool method to make it sound pretty naturally feminine by transposing +12 then adjusting format with neptune. It sounds great other then the vocal artifacts. Any way to avoid this? I attached an example

[joeyluck]

Instead of Neptune, you could try using the Pitch Edit mode and transposing and adjusting formant there and seeing if that makes a difference. You won't be able to hear it in realtime while recording, but you could still use Neptune as a way to monitor if needed.

Also, a higher sample rate might help? How are you recording it? Another thing I find that can cause artifacts when shifting pitch and formant is a less than optimal signal.

[RobC]

Maybe try the new vocoder that RS released for shifting. (Or the old vocoder.) It's closer to formant.

That said, bare in mind, that there's only so much these can do, because of the characteristics of a masculine voice. Most of the time, results sound silly, and make people sound like a dwarf, or a pixie, or a South Park "kid voice". Personally, for example, I couldn't listen to a lot of Scooter (German EDM band) music, because of that overly (at least 2 octaves) high pitched crap that they added. > _ < They ruined a lot of their songs. At least I hated those.

Sometimes, I got better results (when testing out which way has less artifacts), if I changed the pitch of the recording, and then time-stretched in Reason.

I haven't tested Mimic yet, but I already noticed it has pretty cool features for playing with pitch, too. Maybe give Grain a shot, and see what you like of all the different types of changing pitch.

Otherwise, it's just music. Use your real vocal range as is.

[chimp_spanner]

To be fair, the artefacts don't actually sound bad. Not sure what style of music you want to make but this kind of processed style sounds deliberate anyway. It will probably sound perfectly okay with music. Would like to hear it if you've got it!

[pushedbutton]

I do some pretty extreme vocal pitch shifting with work. There's really no fast way to accomplish it properly. It's definitely worth using the pitch correction tool but it's important to pay close attention to what it's doing and avoid putting all your faith in it. Neptune, I find, is better as a tool to be used as you record to give your performance a bit more confidence. I do this by assigning a midi vocal channel to it and brute forcing the tuning with it.
Once you have the vocal hitting the pitch you want you can use neptune to change the formant, I'd probably do this by stripping it into separate frequencies by using parallel channels. You can get some interesting effects quickly but it takes time to avoid the t-paining.