5 great plugins for vocal FX

Celemony Melodyne 230 » 10/10 » €99-699

A quasi-magical audio editor that can even manipulate polyphonic material, this is also a secret vocal weapon. Use the Formant tool to create Skrillex-style shifts in timbre, or snap words to single notes for a synthetic quality. www.celemony.com

Sonic Charge Bitspeek 164 » 8/10 » $40

Give your vocals that text-to-speech vibe with this voice resynthesiser. Decrease Frame Rate for grainier results, and turn it right down to ‘freeze’ the sound – try automating this to design eccentric vocal patterns and FX. www.soniccharge.com

Soundtoys Little AlterBoy N/A » N/A » $99

Packs in pitch and formant-shifting alongside auto-tuning and a vocoder effect. Use the Dry/ Wet knob to dial in a harmony voice alongside the original one, and unlink the Pitch and Formant knobs to tweak the age/gender of a vocal independently of tuning. www.soundtoys.com

Antares Auto-Tune N/A » N/A » $47

While not necessarily the most widely used, it’s almost certainly the most famous (or infamous) plugin of all time. You can get that T-Pain hardtuned effect by selecting a scale appropriate to your track, and slamming the Retune Speed right down to 0. www.antarestech.com

Madrona Labs Virta 232 » 9/10 » $89

Very different from the other plugins featured here, this is a patchable modular effect that can transform the human voice into all manner of otherworldly sounds. You’ll really need a solid grasp on what the modules’ ins and outs do to get the most from this one, so read the manual! www.madronalabs.com