Buyers’ advice

When it comes to buying a plugin specifically for vocals, you need to decide what your needs are from the many issues vocalists have. It might well be that a simple EQ is all you require, just to bolster certain frequencies to give your vocal more body, or remove mid and high frequencies to reduce overall harshness.

More likely than not, you will have tuning issues from time to time. Even the best vocalists will have an off day in the studio sometimes and you might be left with the odd note to put in place or simply need software to help ‘guide’ your vocalist as they sing. With all such tuning issues, there are lots of options available, from software that gets right into a mix to edit tuning issues (Celemony Melodyne) to simple plugins like

Little AlterBoy that nudge your pitch manually.

The Auto-Tune effect is probably the biggest decider when it comes to vocal processing. This is the slightly synthetic, quantised vocal sound that’s been a chart staple in many dance and rap genres since Cher made the effect famous in the song Believe in 1998. As arguably worn out as this effect is, you can’t deny its continued popularity, and those predicting its demise have been many and all mistaken over the last couple of decades.

With that in mind, an ‘AutoTune’-like plugin is a good tool to have in your armoury and at least four of our options deliver it, from the simple AlterBoy right up to the one that started it all, the famous Auto-Tune Pro.