Synchro Arts Revoice Pro 5

As this vocal production powerhouse evolves, it’s not only growing more powerful — it’s also becoming quicker and easier to use.

At heart, Revoice Pro (I’ll refer to it as RVP from here) from Synchro Arts is an audio pitch‑, formant‑ and time‑processing app. There are plenty of those available now, including some powerful options built into DAWs, but what makes RVP particularly interesting is its unique ability to analyse multiple audio files and then apply one or more characteristics (pitch, timing and/or level) of one of them to any or all of the others. For instance, if you have two singers singing in unison and you wish to tighten up the pitch and timing differences between them, this can be achieved in just a couple of clicks. It doesn’t take much more effort to do the same for a whole stack of backing vocals, whether they’re singing in unison or harmonies. And, applying the same concept ‘in reverse’, RVP can create some very natural‑sounding fake double‑tracks too, by cloning a vocal part and then applying a specified amount of randomness to the clone’s timing, pitch and level. Furthermore, the results of any process can be tweaked for every new part created, and the results of all these processes can be dynamically linked, so that if you go into the Guide track and make corrections to the pitch or timing, these will all be cascaded out to any Dubs or Doubles you’ve created.

It’s pretty powerful stuff and, compared with traditional processors and editing tools, it has the potential to save music producers a huge amount of time when working with vocals, in almost any genre. And despite the name, it can also be used with other monophonic sources. I’ve used it to good effect with lead guitars and bases, for instance. And it’s not just about speed and convenience: importantly, the processing also sounds very good. Almost unbelievably, it’s approaching half a decade since I first evaluated RVP4, and if you’ve already read my review (which is free to access on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/synchro_arts_revoice_pro4), you’ll know that I ranked it amongst the most natural‑sounding pitch‑ and time‑manipulation processors available at that time. It still is now.

Nonetheless, there were some aspects of v4 that I felt might be improved. Despite progress since earlier versions, moving audio between some DAWs and RVP could feel a little clunky, and inside RVP I found some of the terminology a bit alien, while some processes took more clicks and keystrokes than I felt should be necessary. Well, step forward Revoice Pro 5 — this latest version does a lot to address all those issues, while also ushering in an abundance of helpful changes that should make the app quicker and easier to use for everyone.

Plugged In Thinking

The new ARA2 plug‑in allows you to do rather more than simply transfer audio from your DAW to RVP.RVP5 is, at heart, a standalone application (for Mac and Windows OS) that can be used completely independently of your DAW and, as with previous versions, is authorised via iLok. But installed along with the main app are a few DAW plug‑ins that aim to take the pain out of transferring audio from your DAW to RVP and back again. It’s perhaps worth noting that the old AudioSuite plug‑ins for Pro Tools — the ones that allow you to apply presets pretty much instantly from within the Edit window — are still present, and that RVP still supports the drag‑and‑drop transfer of audio clips between applications. But the big news is that the Revoice Pro Link plug‑in, available in AudioSuite, ARA2 and AU/VST3 flavours, has been reworked to make it quicker and easier both to get audio from your DAW into RVP, and to monitor the result in your DAW.

More DAWs support ARA2 now than did when RVP4 came out, and I expect this version of the plug‑in will be what the majority of users end up using most.

More DAWs support ARA2 now than when RVP4 came out, and I expect this version of the plug‑in will be what the majority of users end up using most. Depending on how your DAW handles ARA2 and what you’re trying to do, you might prefer to instantiate this plug‑in at the DAW track level, where it can be used to capture/process/monitor multiple different clips, or directly on individual audio clips. Once instantiated, the GUI will tell you if RVP isn’t open (you’re prompted to click a button to open it). You can then hit a button to capture the selected clip(s) into RVP and spot it on the RVP timeline, so it’s in sync with your DAW — you have the choice to specify to which RVP track it’s captured, or to automatically create a track. Now, when you press play in your DAW and the playhead gets to that clip, you’ll be monitoring the audio for that clip in RVP, rather than the original that still sits on your DAW’s audio track. When ready to commit, you just use your DAW’s render function, as you might with any other effect or virtual instrument.

Something that’s new is that you can now, from the ARA2 plug‑in GUI, do more than simply capture the audio into RVP. You also have the option to apply some presets: instead of Capture Only, which is the default, you can choose Capture and Match Timing / Pitch / Level or Capture & Create Double(s).

Instantiating the ARA2 plug‑in on specific audio clips in Cubase.

There’s a very similar AudioSuite version of this Revoice Pro Link plug‑in for Pro Tools users, and if using ARA2 is inconvenient for you, or your DAW doesn’t support it, you still have access to an AU/VST3 version. This is similar, but records the audio during DAW playback and doesn’t offer the ‘instant processing’ options, only the capture and monitoring. While playing the audio in does mean a slightly longer wait, performing those processes inside RVP isn’t daunting.

There will also be times when you are performing more sophisticated processes in RVP that create new audio files, and these will often require their own DAW tracks. Likewise, the way your DAW handles mono and stereo tracks can make it tricker to monitor what you want in the DAW. In either case, you can simply select the desired clips in RVP, hit Shift+Option (for Mac — I believe it’s Shift+Ctrl for Windows), drag them into your DAW, release the modifier keys and unclick. Then just use the relevant command in your DAW to ‘spot’ these time‑stamped clips on the timeline (in Cubase, for example, this is called Move To Origin).

It’s worth pointing out that Synchro Arts have published an excellent series of YouTube tutorial videos to help users of different DAWs get their bearings. And what this all adds up to is that RVP5 feels much better integrated into your DAW than previous versions: you’ll spend less time setting up RVP, and less time switching between the two applications. I encountered one or two very small bugs with the transfer and monitoring that had squeezed past beta testing, but nothing that prevented me using RVP comfortably, and Synchro Arts assure me these are being dealt with.

Power Tools

RVP4 had a number of useful tools for editing the pitch and time of a part, and these all remain present and correct in v5. There are helpful tools for splitting note blocks, for adjusting the pitch automatically or manually, altering pitch drift, time‑stretching and more besides. Of course, while RVP is great for detailed edits, it’s also capable of automatic broad‑brush correction. For instance, to snap a whole part to the nearest note, all you need to do is hit Cmd+W (Ctrl+W in Windows). Unlike if you’re using a real‑time automatic tuning plug‑in, you can also then go in and tweak the details to the nth degree. And when it comes to doing that, there’s been a substantial improvement...

Alongside the existing tools, Revoice Pro 5 has the more versatile and intuitive tools Synchro Arts introduced in their RePitch software, with adjustable nodes on note blocks and the Shaper tool.

The main ‘warp’ view, in which you can adjust the pitch, timing and level of a whole part or individual notes, has been treated to a significant overhaul. In essence, the old Selector tool has been turned into a versatile multi‑tool — a feature borrowed from Synchro Arts’ RePitch (released about a year before RVP5, and reviewed by Sam Inglis in SOS February 2023). Detected notes are represented as ‘blocks’ as before, but each block now has four nodes that act as handles for different processes. The mouse cursor’s purpose also changes according to where on the block you place it before clicking. By the way, RePitch’s superior zooming and scrolling features for the main page have also been inherited.

The nodes allow you to click‑drag to flatten, expand or invert the pitch modulation within a block’s pitch (top middle node), or adjust the pitch drift (bottom left), level (bottom middle) and amount of pitch correction being applied (0‑100%). Move the cursor elsewhere on the block, and you can click‑drag to move or time‑stretch the note, or adjust the pitch. Meanwhile, double clicking on a block forces the note to ‘zero’. The Draw tool already allowed you to adjust a block’s pitch trace manually, but with the new node‑based Shaper tool it’s super easy to smooth, exaggerate or completely rewrite a note’s natural modulations and vibrato. What’s more, RVP detects non‑pitched elements, such as noise, breaths, esses and certain consonants, and treats them differently: the block will have only one node, which controls the level. This can be really helpful if you like to de‑ess manually as you go through a part to work on pitch and timing. The changes are very welcome, as they mean RVP feels significantly quicker and easier to use.

Processes & Presets

The raison d’être of RVP extends well beyond the processing of individual files, though. The cleverest part is the way it can apply the characteristics of one file onto others and create fake doubles. There’s been strong progress here too. First, the best way to get what you want from RVP processes has always been to choose a preset and tweak it, and there’s now a greater array of presets to choose from. Partly, that’s because there are new features, and chief amongst those is probably SmartPitch. You can, as before, get RVP to force the output from aligning a Dub part to the same note as the Guide, either in the same or the nearest octave. And you could tune the Dub individually if preferred. But now, RVP can work much better with harmony parts. SmartPitch decides where it should force a harmonising double to the same note as the Guide, and where simply to correct to the nearest semitone or scale note. For me, this worked flawlessly and is a big reason to upgrade from v4.

Revoice Pro is pretty good at time‑alignment, even when there are gaps in the audio. But if you experience problems, you can specify regions of a Dub part that you wish to be immune to any processes being applied. These areas appear highlighted in red.RVP can also do a lot to help you when working with what I think of as ‘intermittent doubles’. That is, vocals that come in to accentuate some phrases in the lead vocal but not others. I remember working in RVP4 with a rap track in which that technique was used a lot, and I found it more challenging than I’d hoped. When working with a single file, the long periods of silence apparently caused RVP some confusion, throwing its time‑alignment out of whack. Already, in RVP4, Synchro Arts had brought in the SmartAlign feature to deal with this, but while this has worked very well on most material I tried, on a couple of specific projects the audio seemed to ‘trick’ RVP into sync’ing the wrong points in two files. Thankfully, there were ways around this that I probably hadn’t fully got my head around when writing that review, and these facilities remain in v5. You can, for example, ‘protect’ certain areas of a dub from the applied processes, and you can also create sync points that instruct RVP where a certain point in the Dub should match a corresponding point in the Guide, just to make the algorithm’s life a little easier. These also remain in RVP5, but I think the new Revoice Pro Link plug‑in, and particularly the ARA2 version, will also make it quicker and easier to go through your project and treat such ‘intermittent’ parts as separate clips in RVP. I should stress that, for the most part, RVP does a cracking job of aligning multiple signals — a better job than anything else I’ve used.

The Bottom Line

Revoice Pro has always been unique and incredibly powerful but, in version 5, Synchro Arts have delivered a product that feels mature. There’s potentially much more I could have written about the finer details when using it with different material and different DAWs, but the manual and Synchro Arts’ tutorial videos can fill in most of those blanks. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve managed to convey a sense of just what Revoice Pro 5 could do for your productions, and how much more intuitive it is than its predecessors. It may not be the most affordable app for home studio producers, but this is Synchro Arts’ flagship, do‑everything product. Also, the upgrade price from v4 is actually pretty modest, and if you don’t need all the functionality then the more affordable Synchro Arts apps that have a narrower focus, such as VocAlign and RePitch, might be worth checking out too. Highly recommended.