Waves Harmony

Waves have a knack of making sophisticated plug‑ins easy to use, and this one is no exception.

Harmony plug‑ins and pedals are nothing new, but Waves have gone the extra mile to make Harmony easy to operate while still offering enough control to make artificially generated vocal (and other instrument) harmonies sit in the mix in a very natural way. In addition to producing conventional harmony parts, Harmony can also be used in a number of creative ways when a natural sound isn’t what you’re after. In fact, there’s a lot of scope for unusual production techniques. The source audio can be pitch‑corrected with hard or soft modes before the harmony generation, and there are various modulation options, as well as formant tweaking.

Overview

When setting up, the Time and Cents controls determine how cleanly the harmony generator reacts to pitch and timing variations in the incoming audio. There are then essentially three modes of operation, the simplest being an automatic chord generation function that follows the musical pitch of the source and conforms to the key, scale type and chord type selected. A chords menu below the keyboard shows the chord type options arranged by musical genre, including a number of EDM variations. The musical key is selected at the top of the screen above the note map keyboard.

Optionally, the user can again set the key but can then add manually up to eight harmony voices and select their intervals relative to the incoming notes. If you want to check out the presets without the key and scale changing there’s a lock option. The graphical soundstage display in the centre allows individual voices to be dragged left or right to adjust their pan position, as well as up or down to adjust their volume. Harmony settings can be saved as snapshots for later use.

Specific harmony notes may also be played in from a keyboard in real time or from a MIDI track. A keyboard note editor lets you choose which new notes will play when input...