Marshall Graphics Systems

From the company that revolutionized vocal production with Auto-Tune comes AVOX 2 - the second generation of the Antares Vocal Toolkit. Building on the power of the original AVOX plug-in bundle, AVOX 2 adds an additional five state-of-the-art vocal processing modules, including Harmony Engine Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator, to give musicians, producers, and engineers the power they need to create stunning vocal tracks in any musical style as well as design unique vocal effects for audio post-production applications.

And at the same MSRP as the original AVOX, AVOX 2 matches its unbeatable creative power with truly unbeatable value.

The AVOX 2 Antares Vocal Toolkit includes:

Harmony Engine Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator

With four independent harmony voices, a variety of powerful harmony generating modes, humanization features for natural sounding performances, and a flexible real-time preset system for harmony and vocal type, Harmony Engine provides incredibly easy-to-use tools to quickly and easily produce virtually any vocal arrangement you can imagine.

Whether you’re an experienced vocal arranger, a songwriter looking for that perfect backup vocal, or a composer experimenting with unique vocal effects, Harmony Engine gives you entirely new ways to create the harmony parts you hear in your head. In fact, experimenting with different harmonies is so easy (and, dare we suggest, fun), you may find yourself using Harmony Engine to explore harmonic alternatives you may have never otherwise considered.

Learn all about Harmony Engine and listen to audio demos on the Harmony Engine product page.

MUTATOR Extreme Voice Designer

MUTATOR provides a combination of tools for creating unusual, weird, or downright wacky voices. With high-quality pitch shifting, throat modeling, pitch-tracking ring modulator-based “Mutation,” and a mind- bending Alienization function, MUTATOR is the perfect tool for unique vocal special effects and post-production sound design.

Audio Examples

All except the final MUTATOR demo uses a single instance of MUTATOR to process the same female vocal phrase.


Pitch Shift, Throat Modeling and Mutation

In these first two demos, we use MUTATOR's Pitch Shift and Throat Modeling to create relatively natural variations of the original vocal.


In the next demo, we combine Pitch Shift, Throat Modeling, and one of the 24 varieties of Mutation to turn our vocalist into a demon.

Alienization

Alienization is a realtime process that chops the audio input up into sections and plays each section backwards. The Dialect control selects the length of the sections.

In this first example, we apply Alienization with a medium Dialect setting to the otherwise unaffected vocal.


In the next example, we add another variety of Mutation and set Dialect to a shorter period, allowing more recognizable bits of the original phrase to come though.


Finally, yet another variety of Mutation with Dialect set to a much longer period, moving fully into the land of the weird.


Automating Variations

All of MUTATOR's various tools can be automated. Here we torture our vocal for the last time, varying pitch shift, throat models, mutation, processed/original mix and alienization.

ARTICULATOR Vocal Formant and Amplitude Modeler

The alien offspring of a vocoder and a modern-day version of the venerable talk box, ARTICULATOR lets you extract the formant and amplitude information from a vocal (or other dynamic source) and apply it to any other audio track or to a built-in broadband noise generator. Perfect for talking guitars, singing synths, whispering voices, and a wide range of special effects.

Audio Example

This demo begins with the extreme suck of the vocal control signal, clearly showing that neither vocal quality nor accurate pitch is required for an effective result. It's then followed by examples of that control signal used by ARTICULATOR to process three different guitar sounds.

It's important to note that none of the vocal control signal is mixed into the musical examples. What you're hearing is entirely the result of ARTICULATOR applying the control signal's formant and amplitude model to the guitar.

WARM Tube Saturation Generator

Based on Antares’ legendary Tube plug-in, WARM warms up vocals with Antares' world-renown analog tube modeling technology, while being so processing-efficient that you can put an instance on pretty much every track in a project and still barely see your CPU meter twitch.

With two tube models, a variable Drive control to set just the right amount of dynamic saturation, and an innovative OmniTube™ function to apply the tube effect to the entire signal (as opposed to just the transients), WARM is a great-sounding, incredibly easy-to-use tool for giving your vocals the benefits of a wide range of modeled analog tube effects.

ASPIRE Aspiration Noise Processor

ASPIRE is the world's first tool for modifying a voice's breathiness independently of its harmonic content. Whether reducing a bit of vocal rasp or adding a bit of smokiness, ASPIRE allows modification of the amount and quality of a voice’s aspiration noise without otherwise affecting the vocal’s harmonic characteristics.

When you speak or sing, air from your lungs is forced through your vocal chords, causing them to vibrate. The resulting waveform is propagated through the throat, the mouth and out through the lips. It is the shape of these structures that create the resonant characteristics that define a unique vocal identity.

But going into a bit more detail, the vocal waveform is actually a combination of two different components. One, the one we usually think of as the primary element of vocal timbre, is the harmonic content generated by the process described above. However, there is a second component that is generated by the turbulence of the air rushing past the vocal chords. This component, aspiration noise, does not have harmonic content and can roughly be thought of as “breathiness.”

Aspiration noise presents itself in a variety of ways, from a subtle bit of breathiness to a full-blown rasp. Of course, whether it’s a problem or not depends on the amount of noise and the style of a performance. A whole lot of roughness that would work well for screaming punk or roots blues might well be a problem for mainstream pop or a smooth ballad (of course, it also might not). Up to now, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Now, with ASPIRE, there is.

Audio Example

This demo consists of three repetitions of the same vocal track used above in the MUTATOR demo. The first is the unprocessed voice. The same phrase is then repeated with ASIPRE set to increase the aspiration noise to give the voice a grittier sound and then again with ASPIRE set to reduce the aspiration noise for a smoother sound. Note that in each case, the basic harmonic quality of the voice remains unchanged.

THROAT Physical Modeling Vocal Designer

THROAT is a radical new vocal tool that, for the first time, lets you process a vocal through a meticulously crafted physical model of the human vocal tract. THROAT begins by neutralizing the effect of the original singer's vocal tract and then gives you the ability to specify the characteristics of the modeled vocal tract.

THROAT's controls allow you modify the voice's glottal waveform as well as globally stretch, shorten, widen or constrict the modeled vocal tract. For even more detailed control, THROAT's graphical Throat Shaping display allows you to individually adjust the position and width of five points in the vocal tract model, from the vocal cords, through the throat, mouth and out to the lips. Finally, THROAT's Breathiness controls let you add variable frequency noise to the model, resulting in a range of vocal effects from subtle breathiness, to raspiness, to a full whisper.

While THROAT has been designed to allow subtle modifications to a voice's vocal quality, the range of the controls also allows the creation of vocal tract models well beyond the limits of physical human anatomy, offering the possibility of vocal characteristics that are simply unattainable by any other means.

DUO Vocal Modeling Auto-Doubler

DUO automatically generates a doubled vocal part from an existing vocal. In addition to allowing programmable variation in pitch, timing and vibrato depth, for even more realism, DUO also includes a simplified version of THROAT's vocal modeling to provide timbral variation for the doubled part. DUO's output section gives you independent control of the level and stereo position of the original and doubled voices.