Vovious

Vovious claims to do things differently from the vocal‑tuning establishment. Can it go toe‑to‑toe with the best?

Alongside well‑established market leaders like Auto‑Tune and Melodyne, there are now various creditable vocal‑tuning software alternatives, including some excellent tools built into different DAWs. On the face of it, that makes launching Vovious — which its developers describe as a “natural” vocal‑tuning plug‑in — a pretty courageous move. But they clearly believe Vovious offers something different from the crowd, so let’s see if it might tempt you away from your current tool of choice...

Graphs & Models

Perhaps the first thing to note is that Vovious doesn’t offer real‑time automatic pitch correction. Rather, it’s based around an offline graphical pitch‑editing environment that’s similar in principle to Auto‑Tune Pro’s graphical mode, and offers both simple tools for nudging notes towards a target and much more detailed control in a sophisticated graphical editing environment. Vovious can run as a standalone app, as a conventional VST3/AU/AAX insert plug‑in or, if your DAW supports it, as an ARA2 plug‑in. For the bulk of my review tests, I ran Vovious as an ARA plug‑in in Cubase Pro 15, but I tried the other options too, and they also provided a very smooth experience.

Vovious have created an ‘explainer’ video that hints at their software doing something a little different under the hood in terms of how the pitch‑shifting is achieved — it’s on their website and well worth watching if this review piques your interest. It implies some fairly sophisticated analysis of the audio material that dictates how both the harmonics and formants are processed. Understandably they don’t give the whole game away, but essentially it seems that, in order to achieve a more transparent result, the software uses a mathematical model of the human vocal tract. The sophistication is all behind the scenes, though, and the user experience should feel very familiar to anyone who’s used other graphical tuning tools.

Smooth...