Vocals are a vital part of many contemporary styles of music, and with music production technology improving by the day, artists are always seeking exciting new ways to process their vocals. In this review, we’re putting Baby Audio Humanoid through its paces. We’ll examine its core features, how it works and how useful it is for adding a deeply digital flavour to vocals.
What is Humanoid?
Baby Audio Humanoid is a deep hard tuner and vocal transformation plugin from the LA-based plugin developer that brought you Crystalline, Super VHS and Comeback Kid. While Humanoid is designed for use on vocals, it’s capable of applying distinctly digital pitch correction and resynthesis to a range of instruments and sound sources.
How Does Humanoid Work?
Let’s take a look at Humanoid’s feature set and operation.
Plugin Interface and Layout
Humanoid is split into five distinct sections, in which the signal flows from top left to bottom right exactly as you’d expect it to. This makes navigating around the interface extremely intuitive. The five modules are Pitch, Synthesize, Filter, Utility and Effects, and we will explore each module in more detail below.
Pitch Module
Humanoid’s Pitch module hard tunes incoming audio according to how it’s configured. The four modes let you dictate how Humanoid tunes your audio. Manually or automatically repitch audio with the Note and Scale modes, or use MIDI mode to play notes in live for a more performative approach to pitch correction. In MIDI mode, you can play up to five notes simultaneously for a polyphonic vocoder effect.
The Quantize control lets you set how quickly Humanoid corrects your audio to the target pitch, while increasing the Robotify level takes your vocal from slightly unnatural to completely synthetic. You can also apply traditional formant shifting with Humanoid’s Formant control.
Each of these controls in the Pitch module, and many others within Humanoid’s interface, allow for even deeper control over their parameters. This is signified by a small cog icon next to the parameter name. This feature gives you the option to access more under-the-hood settings without cluttering up the plugin interface.
Synthesize Module
The Synthesize module is arguably Humanoid’s most unique feature, which is no real surprise given its positioning at the front and centre of the plugin. The module creates an even more digital sound by resynthesizing sung notes according to the correction being applied by the Pitch module. The inbuilt Note Shift and Octave controls can be used to add interesting harmonic content to your hard-tuned vocals, which can then be blended in with the Transform and Mix controls.
With advanced oscillator shape calibration, pulse width modulation-esque Stretch controls and 64 factory wavetables to choose from, the Synthesize module greatly extends the sonic capabilities of Humanoid. You can also import user wavetables to get even more mileage out of the plugin. It’s clear that Humanoid’s Synthesize module is not some gimmicky afterthought; it’s a fundamental part of the plugin’s operation.
Filter Module
Humanoid’s Filter module works like other filters you might be familiar with, and can be used to tame unwanted frequencies or remove them altogether. With dedicated Low and High-pass filters, as well as a single band of parametric Mid-EQ, you get plenty of control over the plugin output’s frequency content. The inbuilt spectrum analyser is a useful addition for visualising your signal’s frequency content.
With negative values, the filter Resonance parameters work like traditional EQ controls. At positive values, filtering is applied with extremely steep slopes. This is helpful for completely removing frequencies outside of the filters’ cutoff values.
Utility Module
While we can’t speak for all music producers, we’re definitely guilty of occasionally skipping past anything labelled ‘Utility’. After all, the Utility section rarely houses a plugin’s most glamorous functions. That’s not necessarily true with Baby Audio Humanoid, though.
While the inbuilt De-esser and Gate controls certainly have a practical purpose in taming the plugin’s output, they can be used in creative applications too. De-ess can be used (and even automated) to completely alter the tone of Humanoid’s output. Gate can be used to control unwanted background noise and apply more staccato vocal effects. Additionally, the De-ess, Gate and Smoothing features can all be configured on a deeper level thanks to their calibration options.
Effects Module
Humanoid’s Effects module gives you the opportunity to add a final layer of processing and polish to your pitched vocals. The Widen control gives you access to instant stereo widening with the Haas effect, and the Warble control applies Lo-Fi-style pitch modulation for a very musical vibrato effect.
From our testing, though, the Buffer and Freeze controls are the most usable and interesting part of the Effects section. Hit the Freeze button at any point to capture and loop a portion of the processed audio for trippy vocal effects. The Buffer control sets the duration of the loop, and can be beat-synced using the adjacent link icon.
Haphazardly experimenting with the Buffer and Freeze buttons while recording the plugin’s output gave us a huge string of happy accidents. These little pockets of glitchy vocals resemble granular processing, particularly with the Buffer unsynced. We were able to quickly repurpose parts of our resampled recording as percussion, ear candy and risers.
Other Features and Functions
Aside from the five main modules outlined above, Humanoid boasts a few more features and functions that enhance your audio processing and improve your user experience.
At the bottom left of the plugin, you can use the Sharpen control to apply an EQ curve to the input signal which accentuates the top end for a brighter mix. You can adjust the EQ’s overall tone using the Bias control in the Sharpen calibration settings.
At the bottom right of the plugin, you can adjust Humanoid’s output level using the Output Gain control. The Output calibration view also grants access to an Input Gain control, and a Dry/Wet control for easy parallel processing.
You can open Humanoid’s settings by clicking on the cog icon at the top left of the plugin. Here, you can enable Tooltips, which displays a concise explainer in the Synthesize window whenever you hover your cursor over a control. You can also use the Theme selector to switch between the clean and crisp light theme, and the sleek and seductive dark theme.
Is Humanoid Any Good?
The Good
Baby Audio Humanoid is designed to apply out-of-this-world vocal tuning and processing for a completely unnatural effect, and it’s fair to say it does this exceptionally well. Combining the Pitch module’s Quantize and Robotify controls with all of the Resynthesize module’s bells and whistles, the range of digital vocal processing that can be applied is vast.
With nearly 200 varied presets and a Load Random Preset button, it doesn’t take long to find inspiration. Equally, the intuitive interface invites you to experiment with the plugin’s many parameters until you find a sound you like. This is particularly important, as Humanoid’s repitching and resynthesis algorithms seem to respond differently depending on the source material. Vocal level, pitch, timbre, and transient information all seem to impact how Humanoid sounds and behaves.
Like all of Baby Audio’s plugins, Humanoid’s interface doesn’t take very long to get your head around. As already mentioned, the hidden calibration controls open a deeper layer to the plugin, helping it to strike the right balance between immediate control and feeling cluttered.
Considerations
We usually call this section ‘The Bad’, however, we couldn’t really find any glaring faults with Humanoid. Instead, we’ve identified a few considerations or areas where we think it could be improved.
From our experience, Humanoid’s output can occasionally sound quite sibilant, which is to be expected from this kind of plugin. The inclusion of a de-esser within the plugin’s Utility section indicates that Baby Audio are well aware of this, and we’re pleased to say that between the de-esser and filter, you have the means to tame any unwanted high frequencies.
We were also able to soften some of Humanoid’s overly-digital edge using time-based effects. With that in mind, we felt that including a basic delay and reverb effect within the Effects section would add further sonic and creative possibilities. Of course, using your DAW to apply either of these effects to Humanoid’s output is a simple process, and is very worthwhile in our opinion.
Similarly, we felt ourselves longing for some means of modulating Humanoid from time to time, particularly some of the parameters within the Synthesize and Filter modules. That said, almost all of the plugin’s parameters are automatable, so there are ways of adding dynamic movement to your vocal processing if that’s what you want to do. Baby Audio have recently released Transit 2 which contains a range of advanced modulation tools, many of which would be a welcome addition to a future version of Humanoid.
While this next point is certainly not a disadvantage, it’s something worth bearing in mind when choosing a vocal repitching and resynthesis plugin. Humanoid is a digital vocal processing tool through and through, so if you’re looking for a natural auto-tune solution, look elsewhere.
The Verdict
Baby Audio Humanoid does precisely what it set out to do - apply transformative digital vocal processing and vocoding that can bring a digital and robotic feel to vocals. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you won’t be disappointed with this creative and powerful plugin.
The well-thought-out graphic user interface and workflow make the plugin a joy to use, and experimentation is rewarded with new tones and textures. We particularly liked the five-voice polyphony in Pitch MIDI mode, as well as the Freeze control for creating stuttery vocal goodness.
Humanoid is available from the Baby Audio website now. You can also trial Baby Audio’s entire catalogue of plugins completely free, including Humanoid.
