Mu Voice is the award winning plug-in by Mu Technologies that
allows you to tune your vocal recordings, apply special effects and add natural
sounding harmonies when mixing your track. The proprietary spectral analysis and
synthesis techniques set new standards in vocal
processing providing a unique tool for your recording studio. Tedious pitch curve editing is history now.
An internal delay of only 5.8 ms makes Mu Voice the ideal vocal processor
to perform live on stage.
Mu Voice 1.3 is available now (free update). The motto of this release is:
"More Control - More Fun"
and it features innovative
and creative ways to control the plug-in from any MIDI controller.
For Studio ...
Chord recogntion, preset selection and chord scheme navigation from a MIDI keyboard were already implemented in 1.2. The
new release features:
MIDI-2-Pitch: The pitch of the lead voice can be tuned to a MIDI note (red keys). The tuning also affects also the harmonies.
MIDI-2-Harmony: Several harmony channels can be put to MIDI mode. This means that when a note is played (orange keys),
it is assigned to one of the MIDI mode channels. This features allows you to create harmonies just by
routing MIDI notes to the plug-in.
(Delta)Pitch-2-Parameter: This is an advanced feature that allows parameters to follow the pitch or the
interval between the lead and the harmony. This feature is important for getting a natural sound.
Our ambition is to create a real-time vocal/instrument processor that could be controlled entirely from
hardware interfaces. Therefore it supports:
Control Change Events: Any MIDI controller can be mapped to any set of Mu Voice parameters.
This requires a very simple set of actions; touching a controller, selecting a number of
parameters, and editing the parameter curves.
Program Change Events: These events are typically sent when a synth bank is changed
or when a foot switch is pressed. Triggering a program change 10, will apply the chord and
preset at the tenth position in the chord scheme.
Playlists: Mu Voice XML files for different songs can be grouped in playlists. Files
are added just by dropping them on the playlist.
MIDI Assignable Navigation Controls: The MIDI panel has six programmable buttons. The first
two are used to move forward and backward through the chord scheme. The second two are used to
do the same but by using anchor points. The final two are to go to the next song in he playlist.
So Easy
A lot of work was done for improving the ease of use:
Windows and Mac Installers make sure that all components are in the right place.
Host integration is improved significantly. The XML project files are now
linked to your recording session. Loading and saving your project will automatically
load and save your Mu Voice XML file.
What's cooking at Mu's kitchen ...
Mu is currently developing a small VST host so that in the next release Mu Voce
can run as a Standalone Aplication.
Mu is working on a number of high performance software libraries.
These libraries will be made available to third parties under a licensing agreement. Libraries will include
FFTs, convolutions and band diagonal solvers.
I have an iLok.com account,
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Intelligent Harmonizing:
An "intelligent" harmonizer takes into account the musical context of a piece
like chord and scale information. This is exactly what Mu Voice does. A four
track mixer allows to configure the voicing (1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th voice) and octave for
each channel.
Scale / Chord Selection:
The chord panel offers a straight-forward interface to select chords. When a given
key signature is selected, the diatonic series of chords is displayed. By clicking
the chords and modifiers, a chord is selected for harmonization.
Chord Scheme Editing:
Chords can be added to a scheme by pressing the "Insert" button or double clicking them.
By clicking an item in the scheme one can navigate through a chord scheme.
Mixer: The mixer combines all four track and allows to mute certain
channels with the [M]-button. The first channel can be put in bypass ([B]-button).
A pitch shift slider adds an extra interval to the channel. The range of the
shift slider is expressed in half tones can be quantized by pressing
the [Q]-button.
Tuner:
Mu Voice comes with a built-in tuner that has a parametric impact (0: no impact,
1: full impact). The tuner has two modes:
"Chromatic": tune to the closest half note
"Scale": tune to the closest note in the current scale
Channel FX: In addition to the voicing configurator, the gain control
and pitch shifter, each track has additional set of FX:
Pan: To abtain a realistic spatial positioning, the panner uses interaural
delays and an interaural gains that are based on psychoacoutic measurements. The
panning parameter corresponds with the angle relative to the listeners nose.
Humanizing: When the pitches of the harmonies are coupled too tight,
they might interfere and be perceived as a single distorted voice. The "humanization"
parameter solves this problem by adding very slight random pitch variations and
an additional delay.
Formants: The formants determine the "timbre" or "color" of the voice.
When the pitch of the Voice is altered, the formants are maintained. One can disable
the formant correction by pressing the green button next to the slider.
The formant slider controls a linear scaling of the formants and alters the colour of
the voice. By shifting the pitch up and scaling the formants, the voice of a women
can be changed to the voice of a young girl.
Filters: Mu Voice offers a number of filter presets; high-pass, band-pass,
comb-filters, notch filters ...
Harmonic EQ-ing: The proprietary spectral analysis technique on which Mu Voice
is based, allow to control the amplitude of each harmonic in the sound.
We named this effect harmonic EQ-ing. A number of presets are provided that illustrate
this unique feature.
Preset Management: To keep the large number of control parameters manageable,
all parameters that are not related to the chord scheme can be saved in presets. By selecting
a preset, configuring the parameters and pressing the 'Save'-button, the preset is stored. When
a preset is selected and the 'Apply'-button is pressed, the preset is loaded. Presets can also
be added to the chord scheme by pressing the 'Insert'-button.
Full Automation:
The progression of chords and presets can be fully automated in two steps
Write Mode: The plug-in is put in read-mode by pressing the [W]-button above the chord scheme.
When you select a starting point and press the right arrow on your keyboard, you will move
to the next position is the scheme while the timing of this event is recorded.
Read Mode: The plug-in is put in read-mode by pressing the [R]-button above the chord
scheme. The plug-in will synchronize itself to the host time so that it becomes fully
automated.
MIDI Controls (Since version 1.2.0 - free update for licensed customers)
The MIDI enabled version gives you full control from
a keyboard, making it an excellent tool to perform live. Use it from a real-time host
like Ableton Live,
Apple MainStage, ...
Key features:
A state-of-art chord recogntion system to control the scale and chord over time.
Preset Selection
Chord scheme navigation
Do not worry about the fact that your keyboard has only 48 keys, the plug-in can be configured for any
keyboard.
Sample Rate Support Mu Voice supports the following sample rates:
XML based file exchange: The plug-in state, chord scheme and presets can all be saved in
XML. This makes the configuration of your plug-in readable, editable and portable over
all platforms.
SIMD Optimizations: Mu Voice is highly optimized exploiting special processor instruction sets
like SSE for Intel processors and Altivec for PowerPC's.
Extra Info:
Mu Voice uses two data files, W.dat and Y.dat. When it can't find them is generates them
automatically. Therefore, when you launch the plug-in for the first time it will take a while
to appear. From there on it will launch smoothly.
Mu Voice works strictly for monophonic audio material.
