Hey there, Geoff Manchester here
from iZotope, and in this video, I want to walk you through the latest generation
of Nectar. Here, we have Nectar four. This is a comprehensive vocal or spoken dialogue mixing
tool that gives you everything you need to really elevate sung or spoken vocals. In Nectar 4, we
have all kinds of new technology and modules to really get you a radio-ready sound quickly and
effortlessly. Also, go down to the description or go to izotope.com and download a trial to follow
along with everything that I'm about to show you. I think we should start with the assistant,
which has been really improved and implemented visually in a different way here if
you're coming from Nectar three. So now we have our own assistant page. We
had one in Neutron, we have one in Ozone, and now Nectar gets one too. So when you first
open up the plugin, it's on the screen here. You can see that we have these two tabs. This is a
detailed view, and this is the assistant. So in order to get the assistant working, we need to
feed it some audio, which I will do right now. [Music] So after the learning pass, we had a little bit
of an animation accompanying the kind of listening that Nectar was doing. We're now onto this page,
which gives us broad controls over the tone, compression, effects, and also if we want any
kind of choral processing. So if we want to add background vocals, we can do that all
from this page. And of course, as always, we have our targets over here, which
if I click this menu, I can see more of it. Identified this vocal correctly
as a song vocal, but if it was rap, it would be over here in rap. And of course,
we have spoken targets, so full, strong, natural, and clear, and we can add our own as
well. And I'll be going over this workflow in a moment. But again, it landed us over here on
singing and balance. So I can click out of this, and why don't we just take a moment to
have a listen to the before and after of this processed vocal before we go and do any
additional tweaking here in the assistant page. [Music] So what Nectar has done is gone in and listened
and then added a balanced overall preset here, which we can then tweak even further. So if
I want to, I can adjust the tonal quality of the EQ of the processing here in the detail
page with one control, which is called shape. So you can see as I move this from the default
50 all the way over to let's say 150 percent, we're going to see this little kind of circle show
up here, and also we're going to see some of the controls in the EQ and the detail page get more
pronounced. So right here, this is at 50, but if I move shape all the way over to 150, we see much
bigger kind of boosts and attenuations. So you are essentially controlling that EQ from this page.
So let's have a listen as we make some moves. [Music] So hopefully you heard at the dive, it
sounded a little thin and kind of pinched, and it's because I was really going all the
way to the right here with the shape control, and when I brought it back to around where we
started, the 50, we got a bit more body back, and so you can just use your ears and
tweak some of these controls to your liking until you like what you hear, and
then you can stop over with intensity. This is going to control the dynamics of
the vocal. So, what you're toggling here is the threshold of the compressor, which, if we go
over to the detailed view, it decided an optical compressor with RMS detection was good, minus 18.8
dB at the threshold. If I were to move this up, you'll see we have now minus 26. So, minus 18
to minus 26. If I bring it back, it'll go back, and you kind of get the picture there. So, if you
want an even more dynamically structured vocal, wrapped or spoken, uh, piece of content, you can
adjust the intensity accordingly. And over here, we have an X Y control that lets you
control the reverb. That's this circle delay. And if you want Dimension, which adds,
uh, phasing, flanging, and chorusing effects on the vocal. I tend to like Dimension. I think
it works really well for this vocal as well, but you'll notice here that the starting
position was over here at the very far left, so we actually have no effects really going on
here. So, let's play the audio back and then bring in a little bit of the delay and reverb
and perhaps the dimension as well. And again, you can listen to all this in real-time and
see if your changes are helping or hurting, uh, whatever it is you're trying to
do, whatever your Sonic goals are. [Music] Actually, add dimension. [Music] I can also turn on the shape intensity voices or effects control here just with this
little icon. So, I can turn it on and off and just audition it real-time to
see if I like what I'm hearing or not. [Music] So one thing I'm hearing is my vocals
feel a little bit loud. I could do a little bit of volume curtailing at the
track level, or I could just go into my detail view and bring my output slider
down a little bit until I like what I hear. That feels a bit more in the pocket to
me. Now, as we continue to go down here, you'll see that we have width as well, and this is
just going to add a stereo widening effect to the vocals. I think I'll see if I like what I hear by
toggling this a little bit over here to the right. [Music] And of course, you can keep all of your parameters
the same and go to a different target to see if it sounds better. And your broad controls with
intensity and shape and effects, they're not going to change. You're just going to get different
EQ settings over here on the shape side. So, if you want, you've come a long way, but let's
say you're like, "I'm not really sure what I, if I like what I'm doing," go and try a dark preset
in my mind, and you'll see the curve change here. Let's go to Bright. I'm going to go back to balanced. I just
like what I had. Now, you'll notice that the voices, uh, macro here is turned off
by default. We can turn it on if we like. Um, I personally am going to leave it off for
this lead vocal, and I will show you a little bit more the module that it is kind of puppet
stringing here from the broad controls a little bit later in the video. And that's the voices
module here. So you'll see that it's turned off, and the voices module in Nectar has been
completely redesigned and improved to be much easier to use. So a little bit more to come
on that module a little further on in the video. But for now, what I want to do is get a little
before and after to see if the processing has elevated this vocal or sent me in another
Direction. So let's do a before and after. [Music] So, obviously, the before was a little
bit louder on the vocal side because the vocals are a little, a little loud.
But after we brought the plug-in in and did our moves for the before and after, the vocals
just sound a lot more kind of flush and in the pocket. And I think some of that is owed to the
intensity control, which controls the compressor, but also the Auto Level module, which is brand new
and kind of reinvigorated and improved in Nectar. We'll talk more about that later, but also we have
a kind of smoothness with the time-based effects, the delay, and the dimension, and also the
reverb as well. And things just sound a lot more kind of pro and polished to my ears.
And I think, hopefully, what I've shown you, there's a lot of talking, but you can quickly
get a really good sound that's in your head, starting with the assistant, and then you kind
of go in and add your own polish to it with some of the modules here. And perhaps you'll be
diving into the detailed view to get a little bit more control, but there's quite a bit of control
afforded to you just from this page right here. So the next thing I want to talk about is the
target system in Nectar 4. So, as always, we have some targets that iZotope has built, which are
designed for singing, again, rapping or speaking. But if you want to bring in your own Target,
let's say you have a file on your computer, your hard drive, it's an acapella, and it sounds
great, and you're like, "I want to have this EQ profile and vibe inform what I'm working on
in Nectar," you can go down and hit this little plus button here and then call up whatever
it is on your hard drive that you like the sound of and just have that be your target that
Nectar learns from and you can mix from. This is a workflow that we introduced in Neutron, and
it's pretty great. But let's say that you don't have a ton of acapellas lying around on your
computer, and the sound that's in your head is actually out there on a streaming service.
You can now use Audiolens, a streaming service, and Nectar 4 together to go and grab a sound
that you really like, just the acapella, by the way, and then have that beamed into
Nectar and use that as your custom reference upon which you can build with other modules
in Nectar 4. Let me show you how that works. So if I go to Apple Music, which is my streaming
service of choice, and let's say that this song here, this "Bring Me the Moon" track by Iris Loon
is the one that I really like. I like the sound of it. It's got a vocal in there that's kind of, you
know, a little hard to hear, but it's very pinched and lo-fi and high-passed, and that's what I want
for my session. It sounds like this, by the way. [Music] So there's some other stuff in that arrangement,
right? There's some kind of like pulsy, synthy percussion stuff, but the vocal is there, and
that's what I like. I can now call up Audiolens, and you guys might be familiar with this
application. It's a desktop app that can take information, metadata from any audio on your
computer or in this case on a streaming service. But what you might not know is that with Nectar
4, we've updated Audiolens to capture not just an entire track but only the acapella. So now what
we can do is use this app to go and listen to a stereo track on a streaming service and
go in between the molecules, so to speak, and just capture the metadata of
a sung vocal or wrapped vocal. So what I'll do is play some audio. It's
waiting for some, and then capture that profile. [Music] So after about 10-15 seconds, I feel like I have
a pretty good learning pass. I'll go in and call this "Bring Me the Moon," and I'll save it. And
now I've got that really nice high-pass vocal that was embedded in a stereo track on Apple Music,
and I've just taken the metadata of it and added it as a Target here. But when I go back into
Logic and then back into my Nectar, you'll see it's beamed that Target in here. So you can
build a whole collection of targets from Tidal, Apple, whatever streaming service you use,
go in, use that acapella capture feature, and just capture the EQ profile and then beam
it into Nectar and keep moving. So let's now inform our vocal in the DAW here from this
target that we just pulled from Apple Music. So I want more of that kind of high-passed,
pinched sound, so I'll increase the shape here. If it feels any better, add some effects, but they're closing up the bar, should
we just widen it a little here together? I think it's compressed enough. I'm not
going to do too much with intensity. You can keep your space.
Let's just check the level. [Music] Cool, so here's before. [Music] Just for reference, here's the
track that we borrowed from. [Music] So that's the process of capturing acapella
targets from a streaming service with Audiolens and then throwing them into Nectar for further
processing for whatever it is you're working on. Okay, so the next module that I want
to talk about is the Auto Level module, which you can find in the detail view by
clicking over here, and you'll see it over here on the left. It's a very small and unassuming but
mighty module that's designed to make it so that you can regulate loudness automatically without
having your compressors work too hard or without having you to go in with a pencil tool and
further tweak the clip gain after you've done all your vocal processing. It sits ahead of any
processing in Nectar, so before you add, you know, EQs, compression, or whatever, it's sitting
there, hugging and controlling the level so that all the other processing downstream doesn't
have to work as hard to regulate the loudness. So we're in a different session
now because I think this session better illustrates the power of the Auto Level
module. What I'll first do is toggle it off. I'll leave the de-esser on; this vocal is a little
sibilant. Nectar's de-esser takes care of it, and just have a listen to the loudness
fluctuations in this piece of audio. [Music] So you can see just at a waveform level when she
says her last bit here on it gets a little quiet. Over here at the beginning, you've got a kind of
guttural like, and that really hits the meter; it gets loud, and "reasons" is kind of quiet.
"You've got toys for giving us," "giving up" is also a little quiet. So this is quite a dynamic
piece of audio, and your job as a mix engineer, certainly with a vocal, is really to
smooth out that vocal so that no one has to reach for that volume. I don't know why it's on my
belt; no one has to reach for that volume control on their phone or whatever because something is
jumping out of place and kind of hurting the ears. So what I'll do is go over here to Nectar 4,
and we'll turn Auto Level on, and I will engage a learn pass, and this is going to allow Auto
Level to regulate the level for you but based on whatever it is that's happening on the tracks.
You don't have to go in and dial in the settings; it's just going to intelligently listen
and then set some things for you, which of course you can tweak further. So before
I get into the controls, I want to show you just how much this vocal has improved at a dynamic
level with the before and after, and to do that, I'm gonna bounce in place so you can really hear
the difference and see the difference as well, especially in the problem spots that we
identified. So I'll just bounce in place. So below, we have our bounced Auto Level module
vocal, and above, we have the before, the one that didn't have any Auto Level on it. I'll turn
Nectar off up here, and here's the before. Listen and look at what you're seeing here. That time is
very loud; it gets quiet over here. We have that guttural jump when she's forming a word there. And
now let's listen to the Auto Level module version. [Music] No compression at all, but this has
been smooth thanks to the ballistics in the Auto Level module. And now I know
my compressor is not going to be working too hard downstream. I can add other stuff on
top that might raise the body of the audio, but those kind of guttural sounds and jumps
in level from certain words aren't going to come up as well because we've done a lot
of smoothing to this vocal automatically with the Auto Level module. Let's now get into
some of the ballistics and controls in the Auto Level module so you understand how it works and
can maybe tweak it in case it's not doing quite exactly what you want it to do. So when I click
on this button, we get some additional controls: tame noises, range, strength, and even side chain.
But first, I want to talk about what's happening in this little box here at a visual level
and also mix and what this slider represents. So we know that the learning pass is great for
listening to the overall level and setting some parameters for you. What this is going to
control is the overall level in decibels. So if I determine that it's still a bit too
quiet at the end of the day after the leveling, I can bring it up closer to the ceiling
or bring it down; it's totally up to you. Minus eight is its kind of default,
but of course after the learning pass, I think it was closer to around
-18 or so. Over here in the trace, you can see the gain kind of controlling things,
positively and negatively, boosting, cutting, working things so that you arrive at around minus
18.6 decibels of overall loudness before the rest of the processing takes over. So take a look now
at the plus and negative numbers as the vocal kind of streams across, and Auto Level module does its
work. You've got "toys," even "on," it's the same. [Music] She'll notice that at the beginning of her
sentences that she's singing, we're doing, we're seeing more negative, more minus, more
kind of control, and then at the end when she finishes her passages, we start to see the plus
button. I know it happens pretty quickly, but it's neat to see that when she runs out of breath and
energy, Auto Level module increases the gain and just boosts her a little bit at the end of those
sections. But when she's singing and doing the most of her kind of vocalizing, we're cutting and
making sure that things are nice and controlled. If I want to change the amount by which
that gain is traveling and reducing or controlling the audio, then that's range's
job. So we have here a six-decibel range, six plus or six negative of travel, if you will,
of control. So that's quite a bit of control, but if I want even more, I could boost it up so
that I have 12 dB up or down of volume control. So that's quite a bit of volume control, or
I can bring it all the way down to something more conservative like two, and that's just a
very small amount of travel to hug and control the audio. If I option-click on this gauge,
we're back at six, so now we have six up or six down of control, which is pretty modest
and why we have it here at the default level. Now the strength, if we move this up, we're going
to be getting much faster ballistics controlling the level. If I bring it down, we're going to be
a bit more relaxed with the attack and release, if you will, controls of Auto Level module,
and it's not going to be kind of quickly cutting things or boosting things depending
on what you have your parameters set to. Over here, if you want even more control,
you can adjust the mix parameter to just blend in a little bit of the unleveled signal
with the leveled signal. So there's quite a bit of tweakability contained within
this very small Auto Level module. We also have side chains, so if I want to have
the level of my track informed by the level of another track, I just hit sidechain, and now
it's going to be doing is listening to whatever external source I have and having that instruct
the leveling structure of Auto Level module. We also have this tame noises control here,
which is really, really interesting. So what this is going to do is instruct Auto Level module
to ignore any noise, so anything that's not tonal in a song or spoken vocal. So what are some
examples of noisy material? Could be breaths, could be sibilance, could be kind of guttural
articulations or just like mouth stuff that's happening. Those things, if they're let into the
gain structure that Auto Level module is trying to kind of regulate, could end up, you know, boosting
things or cutting things that are in a dramatic way. And what this tame noises feature does is
say, "I don't want you to involve sibilance or any harsh sounds into the gain structure. I want you
to leave those things alone because they're not tonal." And this way, they don't end up affecting
the gain structure positively or negatively. You can check to see if noises are truly
being ignored by first making sure this little dial is on and then using the
ear icon to see if it's listening and then ultimately ignoring those
noisy things in a vocal performance. So just to be extra careful here that I'm
explaining this in the right way, it's not going to turn noises down; it's just going to make sure
they don't get involved in the overall loudness structure that Auto Level module is trying to
create for you. If you were to include those, you can just toggle this off. You might notice
some fluctuations that don't result in a very smooth overall loudness structure because those
strident noisy things can sometimes force the Auto Level module to work a little harder or
kind of go and catch something and bring it down in a way that, again, results in a not so
smooth and dynamically controlled performance. So it's up to you if you want to turn it on or
off. I always leave it on, and as you can see, it's very intelligently listening for and
keeping those things out of the gain structure. And as you saw in the "What's New" video, this
module in Nectar, in general, is not just for sung vocals; it's for spoken stuff, so a podcast
or YouTube video dialogue. Auto Level module can go in just the same, whether it's spoken or
sung, and control the dynamic kind of structure of the program material so that you have a nice
smooth vocal, and the compressor doesn't have to work too much harder to kind of keep things
under control for spoken dialogue as well. What I want to talk about now is a totally
improved module that folks who are maybe on Nectar 3 or 2 might know as the harmony
module. It's now been called the voices module, and here it is. Now, I'm not going to
go into every single feature of this very deep tool. Instead, what I want to
do is show you at a broad level some of the controls that you can use to get set
up for success if you're trying to add artificial copies of a vocal that is in your
production session, and you just want to lift things and provide a nice choral background
to whatever it is that you're working on. So, to that end, the first place you have
to start here is setting the key. Now, I know the key is E major, but let's say I didn't
know that. Cue C major. Nectar is smart enough to be able to detect that. So, what I'll do is
play some audio and press the detect button. [Music] E major in the center. Won't you give me, uh,
I'll click it, press the checkmark. So that is really the key to getting everything else set
up for success in the voices module. So once we have the key figured out, the next part is
register. It's automatically set to medium, which I like. This isn't a baritone voice or a
super high voice. Medium works for me. We are now going to be able to move through the voices
module with a lot of success. Again, because as long as the key is correct, everything else is
going to lock to that, and you'll be good to go. So I'll turn the module on, and the first part
I want to talk about is this main section here. Now, from here, we can choose either static
interval styles or automatic interval styles. With static interval styles, we're talking
about static harmonic intervals, so unison, parallel thirds, that kind of thing. We also
have automatic interval styles, which get us more in the territory of dynamic harmonies,
which means stuff like if I mouse over here, moody, uplifting, lush, close, closer, happy,
sad, and all of this is designed to get you a really great sounding result without knowing
that much about voice leading or music theory. So what you can do after you've chosen
E major here is just mouse through the options and see if you like what you hear.
And if you do, you can tweak it further or just set it and forget it. So why don't we
do that? We have E major set. I'm going to go through first the static interval styles
and then the automatic interval styles. [Music] And I can also press this up arrow or down arrow
to change the register according to the in white here main vocal. So now my harmonies are higher
up or further down depending on which arrow I press. So, let's hear the same octave structure,
but I'll go up in register, and here's down. [Music] So now we're getting into more dynamic harmony. [Music] And if in the course of this auditioning
of different structures what you want to do is just hear those harmonies and
ignore the main vocal that has audio in your session, just click this solo button. Give me all your love. Give me all
your love. Give me all your love. So that's super handy, and it'll come in even
handier later when I build my own structure, which I'll show you how to do in just a moment.
But for now, I just want to say that if none of these clusters interest you and you have a
pretty good idea of what you want and maybe even some music knowledge, you can go into midi
and then choose a configuration that works for you based on your fingers animated keyboard. And
if you're not really sure how the routing works, click on this little question mark icon,
and we'll give you a four-step process that's based on the DAW that Nectar
knows you're using. So in this case, we're using Logic, but if I was using Pro
Tools or Studio One, it'll know and give you set up specific options for that digital audio
workstation. So we'll just close out of this. Now, going back to auto mode here for a little
bit more tailoring of the sound, we have some options over here like filter. So we can just
filter out the high end or just filter out the low end or both with these filter options and
further tweak the gain of the low and high over here. We control at a global level with an XY pad
the speed of the adjusting of the pitch and the amount to which they're adjusted over here with
this nice little honeycomb grid. And I can also change the time and pitch controls down here as
well. So there's a ton of customization for those that really want to go in and customize
their pitched copies of the main vocal. So, one thing I want to do is show you how
to create your own custom harmonic structure here. I'm going to go back all the way to
Unison, so we have our main vocal in white over here and our extra little harmonies.
So, if I have a sense of what I want, I can actually just unsolo this and build a harmonic
structure in real time against the actual mix, which I'll do now. And what I'll do is hit my
little pencil icon, and now I can add harmonies below and above my main vocal over here with these
plus buttons, and you'll see we get these third, fifth, seventh options for you to control and
choose. So, I'm just going to listen back and talk and make some choices as I make my nice big chorus
even more chorusy. So, let's make some choices. I'll hit my pencil tool and then get to work. So now I want to choose a harmony
below my main vocal here in white, so I can choose a Unison below. There we
go. For this one, I can choose if I want to, an eighth above. Let's hear how that sounds. [Music] I can click on this to choose something
else. Double click, and let's do fourth. Give me another. That's good. Let's do
another eighth above. Octave. [Music] And another one for good measure. [Music] I can just solo the harmonies. [Music] So that sounds good, but I want to mix a little
bit, and I can do that with this really handy visual mixer which allows me to customize the
panning structure and level structure by going left to right. I'm panning things left to right
in the stereo field by moving them up or down; I'm changing their gain to either be louder
or quieter. This little white dot again, the white is the source track that has
audio in your digital audio workstation, this is going to be here, it's going to be fixed,
we can't move it, but what we can do is kind of crowd our main vocal with our artificial
harmonies from the voices module and do it all in real time. So you'll see that as I move
certain copies around, their respective panning, gain, and other kind of controls here
will move with the moves that I make. This will make much more sense if I just
get into work here and do this. Let me. [Music] [Music] Okay, so I'm happy with the panning and the
level, but what I would like to do is go to the assistant page and just further tweak
things from these broad controls to really mix in and get these artificial copies from
voices in the pocket. So I'll do that now. [Music] Based effects, spring dimensioning. [Music] Widen things a bit more. [Music] Now I'm going to go over and just adjust the
output so that everything is nice and loud. [Music] To delay. [Music] Cool, now let's do one big before and after
with and without our voices. So here's without. [Music] And here's with. [Music] And there we go. So it's pretty easy to
create custom style or pre-configured harmonic configurations and then tweak things to
taste using some of the controls afforded to you in the voices module. Now there's a lot more to
cover, but I just wanted to show you how to get up and running and create really nice, you know,
singers behind the main vocal that just add life and vitality to whatever it is you're trying to
kind of beef up in your mix with some harmonies. So finally, I wanted to talk about the backer
module, which is probably one of the zaniest pieces of DSP we've ever built at iZotope.
And what it's designed to do is create a truly artificial, with a capital A, personality that can
sing over top and within someone else's audio. So, for example, we have a session here where I have
a singer whose name is Emma, very talented. And if I take Nectar off this vocal, you'll hear the
harmony that she sang in order to blend in with a lead vocal that she also sang.
So she sang it a little bit lower. It's like we were never alone. We
want to forever believe. Our music. That sounds fine. And if you pair it with the
original melody, it sounds like this again. It's like we were never alone. We won two four,
which is fine. But if you want to make it so that it doesn't sound like you're singing with
yourself, that's where the backer module comes in. You can choose from eight personas. You can
even sample someone else's vocal out there and add that as long as you have the audio, and then
you could have that backer persona built in. But the eight that we've created are all pretty
varied and interesting in their own right. So in this situation, what I've done is I've
added Alex as the new persona that is going to accompany Emma. And I can blend in the extent to
which Alex takes over, and the original Emma goes away with this blend control. I can alter
the tone, the formant, and pitch things up minus 12, keep them zero, or go
up 12 semitones. In this case, it sounded pretty good up 12 semitones and blended
at about 50 percent. So once again, here's before. And here's with the new persona,
Alex, the original Emma melody. [Music] Now it'll fade. We have actually placed backer
modules across a ton of harmonies, which when they're all playing
together sound something like this. [Music] So again, just to drive the point home,
I'm now on the Ian track, and if I remove Nectar's backer and the entire module from the
track, we can hear what it sounded like before. [Music] So let's bring Johnny in
now. We know we can bring him down. Again, it might sound pretty zany on its
own, but once you bring in a whole bunch of other harmonies, you can create this
really rich tapestry of personas that make it sound like you're singing with
a bunch of people who are not in any way related to you and don't have the same
kind of vocal cords or register that you do. So the last thing that I want to talk to you
about here is the addition of component plugins in Nectar for the advanced SKU. So I can go in
here, and you can now see in the iZotope category, the Auto Level module is its own module.
So now we get Nectar Auto Level module in one component plugin. So if you want to use just
the Auto Level module and then a bunch of other tools by iZotope or any other company, you can do
that. The same goes for that voices module that I showed you earlier. So I can go into iZotope and
I can choose voices, and now we have untethered from that Mothership just the voices module.
So you can now create crazy chains of effects and combine things together in ways that you
couldn't before. Another great example is the EQ in Nectar. It has exclusively that EQ follow
processing. I'll show you what that looks like. So I can bring up the EQ over here, and when I move
one of the nodes around and open this partition, I have this frequency follow option. And now
what's going to happen is it's just going to follow. I'm just going to mute all the other
processing I have here. It's just going to follow one of the harmonics that I instructed
to follow, again, the fundamental right here. [Music] So you now have the ability to really customize
your signal chains and break out the Nectar component plugins into totally creative signal
paths. Totally up to you. And that is one of the brand new things as well in Nectar 4. So thank
you so much for watching. I hope that now you have a better understanding of how to harness
the tools and new DSP and technology in Nectar 4 to really elevate whatever it is you're
working on that is associated with sung, wrapped, or spoken vocals. Take care,
and I'll see you in the next one.
