Dreamtonics Vocoflex

The main Vocoflex screen.

Vocoflex imposes the timbre of one or more reference voices onto another — so just how convincing are the results?

We’ve had the ability to manipulate the pitch and formants of vocal parts for decades now, but while these processors have their applications I’ve always been a little disappointed when trying to obtain really natural‑sounding results. Supporting all the mainstream plug‑in formats for Mac and Windows hosts, Dreamtonics’ new Vocoflex, which also works standalone, tackles the same problem from a different angle, and I’ve been genuinely impressed by what it can do.

Basic Operation

Essentially, Vocoflex applies the characteristics of one or more separate voice recordings to another voice recording: it can load multiple ‘reference’ voice samples and then morph between their characteristics, before applying them to the input signal. So there’s scope for creating a wide range of vocal timbres.

Reference voice samples in WAV format, which need only be 10 to 20 seconds long (but should be solo voices, free from processing such as reverb or delay), can be dragged and dropped directly onto the Vocoflex GUI, at which point they are analysed and displayed as a series of points on a curve. Vocoflex breaks these segments down into shorter segments, and analyses the formant profile for each one (because vocal formants can change during a performance); the points relate to how the sample has been broken into segments. Higher‑pitched or female‑sounding voices are generally placed to the right of the screen and lower‑pitched, male‑sounding voices are arranged on the left.

For the process to produce a natural sound, the reference voice should, ideally, be in the same pitch range as the vocal you’re working on, but where there’s a discrepancy, clicking a tuning fork icon opens a small display next to the displayed curve and a slider below the tuning fork. Pitch‑shifting can then be used to match the input voice as closely as possible to the reference voice. This step is particularly important when changing a male voice to a female one with a naturally different register, or vice versa.

As you play the voice track, it’s possible to influence the result by moving a cursor on screen. This is joined by thin lines to the points on the reference voice curve and as you move it the contribution of the different points is changed. The differences can be quite subtle, as the reference formants may not change much from point to point, but things change completely when you drag in another reference voice. If you then place the cursor between the two reference curves, the two voice characters are morphed and the blend changes as you move the cursor. If you drag the cursor behind one of the curves, the display shows a subtle shadow being cast on the other curve and in that scenario, Vocoflex shapes the sound in the opposite direction to the shadowed curve — effectively the character of the shadowed curve is subtracted from the composite timbre. While that might not quite sound entirely intuitive, in practice...