This seems like the most amazing time saver for those who want to align vocals, create double tracks, and the like, with a whole lot of on-top processing. I’ve used it’s little cousin, Vocalign, and IMO the quality is great of the time-adjusted vocal line in that product, and it is a 20 second-1 button process, rather than … however long it takes to manually stretch the 2nd vocal to the match the timing of the first.
It also has some tuning and processing that looks very much like VariAudio. I wonder how the results compare?
I’ve looked at all the vids for the Revoice Pro 2.5, and recommend the same for anyone that works with double-tracked or harmony vocals. They have a 30 day trial period. I think unfortunately I won’t have my new system set up in time for me to give it a whirl before the 25% off sale ends, but I wanted to pass this along to anyone who might be interested.
I can’t compare, as the last time I used Melodyne was about 7 years ago, but would love to hear your impressions of Melodyne … ! Can you please describe a bit how Melodyne is used for that kind of work, specifically:
Does its doubler/harmony matching functions include set-and-forget options for how much to vary pitch/timing of the processed vocal (options like: “vary timing by no more than X%”, “vary pitch by no more than Y cents”, etc.), as well as how much to spread it across the stereo field ?
Are all the functions (except tuning of course, unless “Believe”-like results are the goal) essentially single button pushes, i.e., no dragging to stretch like in Cubase?
The thing about RevoicePro 2.5 that really sounds so attractive is that once the options are clicked in , matching a harmony or doubled vocal line to the original is literally a matter of a few clicks that take literally a few seconds … instead of hours like in Cubase, for multiple vocal lines, etc.
Does Melodyne allow “excluding” certain regions when tightening a doubled voice, so that swoops, etc. (which can sound bad when stretched/compressed/tuned) are excluded?
RevoicePro 2.5’s feature set is killer-sounding, and it’s for that reason that I’m going to download the free trial to make sure the sonic quality of the processed audio is as good as it sounds in the youtubes.
Here’s a review of a much older version of RevoicePro in Sound on Sound: Synchro Arts Revoice Pro
Well Melodyne is more for pitch/timing correction though Melodyne Studio can be used for doubling. (I use Melodyne Editor.) I also use SoundToys MicroShift for thickening vocal tracks.
Update: Downloaded the demo last night (my first iLok account, gulp). The timing adjustment algorithm is very effective, and also is magic as far as how quick and easy it is to align two vocal tracks. It was too late for me to make any detailed judgement regarding audio quality of the processed track, but nothing jumped out at me as being overtly nasty.
Also super easy to do doubling. There are bells and whistles regarding ability to quantitatively change (in the doubled track) formants (up or down), pitch, timing, panning, etc., along with the ability to make those changes dynamic and random within a user-definable limit (if I understand the interface correctly after my brief experience). I haven’t had a chance to play with that too much, just wanted to initially make sure it worked OK.
It also does pitch/tuning changes, but I don’t see myself getting into that too much given VariAudio 2.0.
All this was based on some simple vocal lines I sang (overdubs to make a major chord), without any tuning done beforehand. I guess after confirming the audio quality is preserved on processed and untuned tracks, I’ll see if there is any difference when tuned tracks are processed.
Hi - anyone here using RevoicePro … can someone help out with the following problem I’m having with time alignment please (it’s in RVP3, but I’m guessing its the same as in 2.x)?
I have a lead voice and a harmony voice I’m trying to time-align. In one part the lead voice is singing two notes, while the harmony voice is holding one note for that time.
RVP doesn’t know what to do with that, it does some drastic (non-musical) time compression/expansion around that part.
Anyone know how to get around that? I was thinking of trying to use the red “exclude” function somehow (never have used it yet), but I figured if anyone here uses RVP they might have come across this sort of thing before.
Thanks!
PS: Should add that in situations where the vocal lead and harmony are singing/changing notes at the same time as is the usual situation, the time-alignment function is simply magical-sounding. No distortion on the time-aligned track at all to my ears.
Yup, protected areas (the red thing) helped a lot. I didn’t fix it completely, but I think I could with a little more time.
Here’s something else I’ve run into that maybe someone can help with … two things really:
Has anyone tried to use a snare or click track as a timing guide? It’s not working at all for me (detection is all messed up). I was doing that to get the vocals on the grid … 3 harmony voices that each entered at a different time, but on the grid … maybe there’s a smarter way?
Is there a way to tell it, “make these four voices all finish at the same time, don’t worry about the start times of each voice”.
Did some tuning work with RVP3 this weekend. My impression, not finalized yet, is that the engine is better-sounding than VariAudio. For example, pitch-shifting a vocal line up 200 cents was “almost” artifact-free in RVP3, not even close to that with VariAudio (raspy voice being tested). When tuning up by a 5th (i.e., from key of C to key of G), the difference was remarkable. It also has some ergonomic advantages (for example, the non-pitched sounds are automatically identified and excluded from pitch shifting; toggling between “segmenting” and “pitch/tune” changes doesn’t require tabbing; “straighten pitch” is done right on the waveform, no more aiming for that thin little strip on the left side of the page), as well as a little clunkiness (can’t mouse to the next note, no key commands for changing the note’s pitch).
Interestingly, the notes don’t have absolute pitch read out , unlike VariAudio’s. The only visual feedback is whether the note resides nearer the top or the bottom edges of the larger pitch area. This absolutely forces the tuning to be done by ear, which is something I wasn’t doing as much as I should have with VariAudio. The results are much better doing it that way, as expected!
Finally, re: tuning, it is not limited to the vocal range … it can do down to 60 Hz or lower, as well as things like flutes (I’m not sure off the top of my head how high up the notes can be).
Also - I finally got a handle on the doubling. It is modeled on the two-tape recorder Vari-Speed technique, and once I learned that it works just fine for me, nice and controlled without the huge pitch warbles I realize now were from combining large amounts of delay with large amounts of delay modulation. I spread those doubles wide; they can be used in the center also, but a bi more attention has to be paid to the doubled track’s fader levels to avoid phasing to my ears.
I’m learning to like this for a lot more than timing/alignment (where it is, of course, simply magical)! There is a beta for a new version coming out, it will have a lot of enhancements (more key commands), and some buglet fixes.
I’ve been using ReVoice Pro 3 in Cubase 8… used it pretty extensively in my last track, and it is going to play a big part in the production of my current one.
I have encountered a bug involving transferring bounced,comped audio tracks from Cubase to ReVoice, although my current feeling is that it’s actually a Cubase bug. Reproducing the problem has been hard; if I’m trying to work on a track, I hit the problem, but if I’m intentionally trying to reproduce the behavior (like I was when I was reporting my issue with Synchro Arts support), it doesn’t happen. I THINK what’s going on is in certain cases, Cubase is attempting to pass Revoice a stubbed-out temp file instead of the actual audio file. Next time I catch the bug in action, I should know for sure and will report it appropriately. (My workaround has been to bounce the problem audio tracks to full stems via audio mixdown; those transfer just fine.)
Anyway, aside from that here are my thoughts so far on ReVoice:
The APT/performance transfer feature produces really good results. This is the main reason I bought it, and I’m very pleased with how tight it is. The procedure isn’t entirely intuitive, but once you’ve done it a couple of times it’s pretty easy to accomplish. In the track I used it on, I had a couple of backing vocals that only came in for a few specific lines in the song. Using APT on the full stems didn’t work at all, because it was trying to align the backing vocals to where the lead vocals began, etc. I had to create separate output tracks for each backing segment and just render out selections. Once I exported the results into Cubase I was able to combine them all onto single tracks again, at the correct times.
While the pitch correction/autotune features seem pretty good, I did not find them very usable. For one thing you can’t audition the individual audio segments like you can in Cubase, and for another, you constantly have to wait for it to render the results each time you make a change in order to hear what you just did. Synchro Arts support said the next version should have some usability updates in this regard, but they didn’t go into detail. But for the moment, I find VariAudio very much more pleasant to use.
I got okay results with the doubling. The doubling feature will take a bit more experimentation though before I can really make a final call on it. Only one of the presets worked for the track I was doing (I think it was the last one in the list, something about medium or mild doubling?), and it only really worked for the song’s chorus. I used a patch that I built in Waves doubler for a couple bits I was spicing up in the verses. There are a lot of configurable parameters in the ReVoice Doubler feature; maybe I’ll just have to work on testing them out a bit to see if I can come up with something that sounds better to me.
But seriously, the APT feature alone is enough for me. Such a time saver, and delivers better results than when I try to do the same things manually via warping and volume automation.
I haven’t noticed that problem, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Are you using the copy/paste method to get stuff into RVP3?
Yeah, I see the same kind of problems. The beta version has a bunch of key commands added, though TBH I’m not sure I remember whether individual segment auditioning is getting addressed in this next version. One thing that RVP3 does bring to the table in turns of pitch correction over VariAudio is that it says isn’t limited to voices, though I haven’t tried other instruments personally, just seen it on their vids. Also, at least so far, the pitch correction engine sounds cleaner/better than VariAudio’s, but that’s just my opinion based on one night’s work …
FWIW, I found that I could get distinctly different doubles that sounded good by inversely varying the modulation frequency and depth - the deeper the average modulation ( the msec range that the double varies from the [average offset adjusted in the top slider], is what I think that means), the slower the modulation had to be to avoid horrid pitch warbles (and vice versa, of course). There was only a very narrow slider range that worked for me (so narrow the slider was all but useless as I recall, I had to type in the values), but within that range things sounded pretty good to me … again, probably with a lot less time spent driving this than you’ve put in.
100% agree on that … the APT feature is like some supernatural thing … amazing!
Can’t wait to see what the future improvements will bring!
The method I was using was this: Have Cubase open and Revoice open, select the Cubase audio clip, and drag it into the Revoice window. When it fails, Revoice reports “unrecognized file type.” You get the same error message in Revoice if you drag a zero-byte file onto it (which I did accidentally when trying to troubleshoot the problem), and Cubase does create some zero-byte temporary files named similarly to active audio clips for whatever reason, which is why I’m wondering if it’s really a Cubase problem.
I would have tried the Link plugin option but I don’t think it ever showed up in my plugin list, even though it’s a VST3 plugin (and those all go to common locations that Cubase knows about). I saw a readme or KB article from Synchro Arts saying that drag-n-drop was their preferred method for Cubase, so that’s all I’ve done. Again, it only has happened for me on audio clips that were the result of a post-comp bounce. Really weird.
I think I remember that Link plug in, didn’t work well for me either, iirc. Lately I’ve had success with CTRL-C in Cubase then CTRL-V in RVP3, FWIW. It’s described in a new chapter in their on-line help, the one at the bottom called “For Cubase/Nuendo”, or something like that. Still do the drag-n-drop on the way back to Cubase.
