Realistic sounding pitch shifted vocals

[English Guy]

I would like to pitch shift vocals to produce harmonies, something I am rubbish at doing as a singer. The built in pitch shifting in Ardour makes the voice sound unnatural. Does anyone know of anything that can do this (say from a C to the G below) and sound realistic please?

[asbak]

Take a look at autotalent

Not sure if it'll accomplish what you have in mind though.

[DepreTux]

take a look at the pitched delay lv2. You can set the delay to zero and use it as a pitch shifter.

[bluebell]

Realistic? Autotalent can do something if the pitch shift is not too big. For example, the lower female voice in the verse (0:36-0:46, 1:01-1:22) is "autotalented". Sounds a bit artificial: http://www.myownmusic.de/player/?songid=346362

To take the formants into account and create very realistic shifted parts you need for example the commercial Windows software Melodyne. There is no Open Source solution that's nearly that good.

[rghvdberg]

take a look at rubberband
it has an option for formant preserving

[bluebell]

Rubberband can't compete with Melodyne when shifting vocals, even with the -F option for formants.

Sorry, but there's no Open Source equivalent.

[stanlea]

No open source, but 2,5 gb of free processing :

http://www.sonicapi.com/

from the guys behind zplane

[glowrak guy]

Not perfect solutions, but a Traction daw license now includes a Melodyne-Essential license,
so if you have access to a a windows setup, you can edit some dodgy takes.
A Digitech Vocalist rack processor might be worth saving up for, lots
of yourube demos to check.
Cheers

[emarsk]

Not to dismiss everybody's good and appreciated advices, but by the time you test the software options, select the right one for you and learn how to make it fit in your work flow, you could just have invested that time in rehearsing your vocal part and improving your singing skills, which is for sure a better long term solution .

For example, you can play the harmonized part with some instrument instead of singing it, and then rehearse (or just record) your singing with the instrumental part as a guide.

[English Guy]

Thanks for all the replies. Nothing I have tried within Linux has worked. Nest stop will be to try one or two pedals I own.

(Whilst I hear what you are saying emarsk, I am still just struggling to get my voice up to par after a bad dose of pneumonia a few years ago, so I was looking for a workaround).

[ssj71]

Are you looking for pitch correction or pitch shifting?

For pitch correction (autotuning) I highly reccommend Fons Adriaensen's Zita AT1. It is a standalone JACK program. It won't work for large shifts, but for small corrections its very clean and natural. Be sure not to set the correction level too high or it will sound autotuned. It does not do formant preserving correction, so large corrections will sound funny. I've used the same algorithm for a pitch shifter plugin called ewham if you want to do a pitch shift. Tuning down will make you sound more like a large bass singer. You can try it.

For pitch shifting (a constant offset of pitch), rubberband has a bunch of parameters you can play with to get it just so. Ardour tries to pick parameters that work for most cases, but you can play with it all you like. You might try the guitarix and/or MOD pitch shifters too.

[English Guy]

Are you looking for pitch correction or pitch shifting?

For pitch correction (autotuning) I highly reccommend Fons Adriaensen's Zita AT1. It is a standalone JACK program. It won't work for large shifts, but for small corrections its very clean and natural. Be sure not to set the correction level too high or it will sound autotuned. It does not do formant preserving correction, so large corrections will sound funny. I've used the same algorithm for a pitch shifter plugin called ewham if you want to do a pitch shift. Tuning down will make you sound more like a large bass singer. You can try it.

For pitch shifting (a constant offset of pitch), rubberband has a bunch of parameters you can play with to get it just so. Ardour tries to pick parameters that work for most cases, but you can play with it all you like. You might try the guitarix and/or MOD pitch shifters too.

Pitch shifting to produce harmonies, rubberband didn't work for me. I'm not sure if I tried infamous plugins as I tried so many, they all made the voice sound so unreal as to be unusable. In this case I was trying to tune down to the 5th below (-5 semitones).

[ssj71]

ok. A perfect 5th all the time will probably sound fairly robotic, since even excellent singers will have some slight variation. Maybe you are already using 2 takes though 1 shifted 1 dry. What exactly was unreal about it? It sounded like a giant person? You might try shifting the backing track a bit and singing the harmony part in a different key so that it is closer to the destination pitches. The farther you shift the harder to make it sound realistic. You might try EWham just for fun (you'll probably have to compile it yourself), but it will end up sounding like someone with a deeper voice than you.

Or... and I don't mean this to be rude, maybe you need to re-record the song in a key where you can sing both parts comfortably.

[DepreTux]

If you want, I can either help you with the pitch shifting or record a vocal track for you. My mic kind of sucks, but you will tell me.

I guess I'm on upper part of the tenor register. My lowest (tuned) note is the guitar's sixth string G.

[English Guy]

Thanks for all the ideas (and the offer of help Depretux) but I think I am going to bail here; I was looking for a quick and easy fix (just to give the chorus a little depth) and at the moment there does not appear to be one.