Post by viciousbliss on May 16, 2017 23:25:23 GMT -6
Got an email from Audiodeluxe saying this was on sale and decided to try it out. I'd heard Antares recently updated it and it exceeds my expectations by quite a bit. Lately I've been putting Waves Reel ADT on the vocal bus. Usually I would start with something like Butch Vig was using in that Waves video and go from there. This is the role I'm putting Harmony Engine in. The layout is similar to my Digitech Vocalist Live 4. The material I'm using it on is a lot of Rock and Metal songs like Ride The Lightning, Somebody to Shove, Dangerous Tonight, Victim of Changes, Madagascar, Would, and Mansion in Darkness. This doesn't provide ideal material to test the harmonies where you're setting fifths and thirds. It's like the VL4 where sometimes you can make fake harmonies sound good and sometimes you can't. I'm more interested in using it with the Unison voice type selected. However, I may test it on vocals I recorded for my originals where I did use the harmonies on the VL4. So far I've been able to get more realistic doubles than with Reel ADT. It has a choir option, and I'll turn that on during a chorus or where I have more than one vocal overdub. I even added the choir to a track where all the overdubs were created out of thin air with Revoice Pro. Sounded great. The choir definitely helped me better emulate a multi-part harmony greater than 3 vocal tracks. Softube's Fix Doubler is another one I own and mainly I use it on mono tracks, sometimes coupled with Little Altar Boy. The Fix is awesome.
I've also been testing the rest of the Antares AVOX line(I own Autotune 8 and find the Flextune to be extremely useful). HE is far superior to DUO and Choir. The new mic modeler was ok but the T-Racks one is better(both are capable of making a vocal better by importing characteristics of other mics). Aspire actually surprised me. It adds some nice airy sorta qualities to my recordings, all done with an SM7 through an ID14. Punch I only tried on the vocal bus as multi-mono and Maxxvolume was way better. Might be good on a mono track. WARM was ok. Sybil is good, maybe more like Ren De-esser. I prefer VLB902. Still need to test the other AVOX stuff but I definitely think the new HE is one of the best vocal tools I've used.
I've also been testing the rest of the Antares AVOX line(I own Autotune 8 and find the Flextune to be extremely useful). HE is far superior to DUO and Choir. The new mic modeler was ok but the T-Racks one is better(both are capable of making a vocal better by importing characteristics of other mics). Aspire actually surprised me. It adds some nice airy sorta qualities to my recordings, all done with an SM7 through an ID14. Punch I only tried on the vocal bus as multi-mono and Maxxvolume was way better. Might be good on a mono track. WARM was ok. Sybil is good, maybe more like Ren De-esser. I prefer VLB902. Still need to test the other AVOX stuff but I definitely think the new HE is one of the best vocal tools I've used.