Few things bring more polish to a production than well produced harmony vocal stacks. Can Waves Harmony bring more vocal magic than it takes away? We find out.

For many, the sound of a fully-produced record begins and ends with harmonies. Whether subtly balanced-in behind the lead vocal to lift certain lines or sections, or as perfectly counterbalanced sides of the same coin, the harmony’s ability to evoke musical depth and enhance the narrative of any song is unrivalled.

Defining Harmony

While the related technique of double tracking vocal lines in unison can provide solid thickening, this does not constitute a harmony as such (despite being one in the purest sense), and the real fun begins when the vocals more closely portray the chordal structure of the music underpinning them. These complementary parts may also be double or even triple tracked to achieve the necessary depth or chorus-ey gloss that big productions love.

Arranging Harmonies

Writers and arrangers often lean on tried and trusted techniques for harmony arrangement which are dictated largely the genre in which they feature. While a soul or gospel record might employ the classic call and repeat phrases evoking a spiritual feel, the simple pop or folk song may only require the odd single harmony to add emphasis or feeling where needed. At the extremes, many acts have taken the harmony technique to its extremes using vast antiphonal textures emanating from just one or a handful of voices.

Taking the melody, arrangers will often sit a major or minor third alongside the topline, with three part harmonies introducing another voice carrying the fifth and/or an octave. Whatever, the arrangement, layered harmony vocals require skill and musicality to execute convincingly, with the actual notes sung often being open to interpretation.

Waves Harmony

More recently, audio plugin giants Waves have been expanding their formidable gamut of tools into territory that goes beyond the familiar plugin territory of channel strips, reverbs, and other processors. Adding to their expanding range of pitch-related tools, Waves Harmony is, not surprisingly, a vocal harmony generator, layering tool and creative FX plugin that the company describes as simple, fun, and playable in the studio and on stage.

Intended Users

Allowing those without the necessary capacity to sing harmonies for real, Waves Harmony hopes to provide a usable palette of up to eight voices to slot into anyone’s production. While this could bring some welcome expensive sounding sheen to the vocals of those without arranging skills or musical knowledge, the tool could also be a valuable time saver for those making production music or demos on tight turnarounds.

Functionality

Described by Waves as a “real-time vocal harmony playground” the tool can be used using one or any of three workflow modes. There is the manual “Playable” mode, as well as “Automatic” and “Graphical/Visual” mode, that allow the user to either let Waves Harmony do the heavy lifting or even play or draw in harmonies on the graph to change them using snapshots. Waves add:

Waves Harmony can also be utilized as an in-depth creative vocal FX palette in any production or mix. It is capable of quickly creating thick vocal stacks and exceptional doubling effects, as well as complex delay arrays, creative voicings, modulated melodies, and sequencing.

Waves Harmony gives a choice of 3 workflow options:

• “Playable” mode - connect a MIDI keyboard and play the chords in real-time to harmonize your voice – once you have set the key and scale, you cannot play a wrong note.

• “Automatic” mode with the “Generate Notes” button which creates harmonies based on the vocal’s pitch – this is the easiest way to generate harmonies if you are not sure which chords to choose or play. It must be noted that Harmony needs an accurately pitched vocal source to generate correct harmonies.

• “Graphical/Visual” mode - click to draw in harmonies on the graph and change them using snapshots.

In Action

Watch in the video how we put Waves Harmony to work on a single vocal. After using MIDI to manually play in note values for its harmony engine, we let it do the thinking for us with the automatic Generate mode engaged. We then use the graphical editor to manually enter voices, refining them in the context of the mix.

Our Verdict

While harmony generation is nothing new, it must be said that up until now, synthesising convincing extra parts that stand up to scrutiny hasn’t always been viable. Inputting key and scale info to give any machine a chance is only half the story, as there are few ‘correct’ answers when it comes to music. Aside from any questions surrounding the musicality of these tools, another big consideration is the quality of the voices themselves. All things considered, producing a convincing audio tool that produces good quality harmonies is a very tall order.

It must be said that any solution, no matter how good it is is unlikely to find its way into the productions of those who can do it for real. That said, as an audio plugin designed for live as well as studio duties, Waves Harmony is one clever audio plugin. As testament to Waves’ commitment to getting it just right they have been making improvements to its sound, GUI, and CPU load, and added more presets just before we published this review.

Does it always make musical sense? Given the correct musical inputs, it will with some user tweaks. This does take away the possibility of completely foolproof operation, but then again, if you’ve made it as far as getting your voice into the DAW, you can probably spend half an hour or so learning a control set that is as easy as possible. Those who don’t expect instant results will be rewarded with usable voices for background vocals that impress.