For the first Harmony Software Demo, we are
gonna look at Reapers effect called ReaVoice. This comes with Reaper and is described as
A MIDI controlled multi-voice pitch shifter. If you don't know what MIDI is, that's fine.
You'll get the idea as we go through this demo. If you wanna learn more about what MIDI
is, you can either see our article 'MIDI Recording: What is it and why is it awesome?', at this
URL and/or go through our course 'The Newbies Guide Audio Recording Awesomeness 2: Pro Recording
With Reaper'. Anyway, let's take a look at ReaVoice. First, we need some audio to put
some harmonies too. So, let's insert a track and either sing something to yourself, just
record it in there or if you wanna follow along with what I'm doing, you can download
the melody to Son of The Sea from homebrewaudio.com/tutorials/resources. You can usually get there from the homepage
menu under resources and tutorial files as well. And it's at the bottom of the page under
For Harmony Recording Awesomeness-Son of The Sea Lead Vocal. Now, that we have some audio to put some harmony
to, we need to add a second track. So, double click here and let's call this Revoice Harmony
One. And click on the FX button to load the ReaVoice effect. Click on Cockos, then double
click on ReaVoice. Pay special attention to this parameter right here where it says "Center
note." It is set to C4, that's a particular C note on the piano keyboard. I'll show you
what that means in just a second. So, let's go ahead and close that. Now, we need to insert
a MIDI item. Let's insert one that's as long as the audio in track one. So, let's make
a selection the same size. Now, click "Insert new MIDI item." Then, hit the escape button
to de-select. The next thing we need to do is to feed the audio from track one onto track
two. We do this by what's called a Send. Come over here on track one to where it says Route,
and click on that. And click on "Add new send," and then a drop down, choose track two: ReaVoice
Harmony One. So, now audio is been sent to track two. You need to do this for ReaVoice
so that the MIDI in this track has something to manipulate in order to create harmonies. Now, put your cursors toward the beginning
of the MIDI item here and double click. That brings up the MIDI editor. Remember when we
looked at the ReaVoice settings, and I said to take note, no pun intended, of the fact
that the center note was set to C4. Here is why. Let's go ahead and play some of what's
happening above. Now, do the same thing but hold down the C4
key with your mouse. Press play first. You probably didn't hear much except that
it got a little louder. That's because C4 is set as the center note. So, if you click
on C4, it's just gonna generate unison, a double of the audio that's coming in. Now,
let it play and just start clicking any other key above and below it. Ouch. Some of that was pretty darn ugly, wasn't
it? Here's what ReaVoice is doing. When a center note is played on the keyboard, it generates
a double of whatever note is being sung. It creates a unison copy of those notes. However,
if you play the next note up from the center note on the keyboard, ReaVoice generates a
note one half-step or 'semitone' as it's sometimes known, up from whatever note is being sung.
Then each subsequent note up or down on the keyboard adds or subtracts another half-step
interval and so on. We really need to have a very quick micro interlude here into just
a spoonful of musical theory. I am sorry, but it has to be done. Like eating one's vegetables.
I'm gonna load up Reaper's virtual keyboard here by going to view, virtual MIDI keyboard.
Okay. When you move up or down from any key, let's start with C as an example. C4, by the
way, is middle C. One note up from that is this black key here, which is C sharp. That
is a half-step up from C. This next note is two notes up and that is another half-step
up from C sharp. So, this is one half-step. That's two half-steps, three half-steps, four
half-steps, etcetera. Likewise for going below C. One note to the left from C is B, that
is one half-step down. One half-step down from B is B-flat. This black note here. That
is another half-step. A is another half-step, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. Back to the ReaVoice explanation. Since
the center note was set in the plugins settings as C4, which is middle C. ReaVoice plays a
unison copy of whatever is being sung if you hold down the C4 note while the audio of the
melody is being played. The same is true if a MIDI file is playing a C4 note. Right there. The first note that's actually being sung
in the melody of this song on the words "I'm the" is a G note. So, ReaVoice senses that
it's a G note and if you play the C4 note it will play back the same G note for those
two words because the center note just plays back in unison. If you play the C sharp 4
note this right here either hold down that key or I'm gonna drag this up. ReaVoice will
convert the sung G notes into a half step up from G, which is G-sharp. If you combine
those two it's really ugly, like this. Just the 'I'm the' you get a G from the audio
and a G-sharp from a ReaVoice. If you play the D4 note on the keyboard, I'll just slide
that up to the D4 note right there, ReaVoice will generate an A note when these two words
are sung. Still ugly. That A note is two half steps
up... One, two and so on. Obviously, the same thing when you go underneath the C. The ReaVoice
notes play on track two down here at the same time as the audio above it, which is how you
get your harmonies. But the fact that ReaVoice creates plus or minus one-half step for each
note on the keyboard further away from the center note, it gets confusing. Heck just
saying that is confusing. This is just one of the reasons why using software to create
harmonies is more difficult than just singing them. Anyway, let me go ahead and delete this.
To create the same tenor or middle harmony part that was written for 'Son of the Sea',
I started out by making notes of how many half steps up or down from the melody that
the harmony part was. If you're really good with music theory then that's probably the
best way to do this, but I'm not. I had to create MIDI notes and then sort of drag them
up and down and around until I got the right notes. It does help to know the notes are
for the harmony part that you're working with. I'm gonna go ahead and load up the actual
sung harmony for the tenor part here as a reminder as a reference. Gonna add a track,
Control-T, lined it up here to make sure that it's starts at the same time as the melody. Okay, as a reminder... So 'I'm the wind', so we can use this as reference.
So now let's open up our MIDI track on the Revoice track here. Let's mute the harmony track. So we're gonna
want 'I'm the'. Let's zoom in. So 'I'm the' looks like it covers. Right about there. Okay, wind is below wind,
so it's gonna have to be below C4 so let's try. Wind that's too high. There that's the right note. Stretch it out
so it last as long as wind on 'the'. Okay and then 'the ocean' still below what
the melody is singing. Melody's going 'ocean' and the harmony is
'ocean', so let's see. Ah, got it right the first time, so from the
beginning... Okay, and I will just continue doing it like
this and now I'll pull the old cooking program trick and say here's one I did earlier. This
is what it looked like when I was done about 30 minutes later. It ended up looking something
like this and it sounded like this. Note how unnatural that sounds. Sounds like
robots and chipmunks singing. That's one of the problems that a lot of harmony generating
software programs have. We can minimize that a little by turning the volume of the harmony
down, which you'd probably normally do anyway. Okay. Now we would do the same thing with
the high harmony. Let's get rid of the middle harmony here, which I had in there just for
reference. Add a new track, we'll call it 'ReaVoice Harmony 2', and remember the setup.
We have to not only add ReaVoice as an effect, but we have to create a send from the melody
audio track to the ReaVoice track. We've done one for the first harmony, let's click on
route to do it again. Add a new send and we'll send it to track three. Now we'll just go
through the same process as I did with the tenor harmony and here's what that sounded
like when it was done. Again we might want to turn it down a little. Let's listen to both harmonies all three parts
together, a real voice and twoReaVoice generated voices. So, if you think that that sound is something
that you'd like as unnatural as it is, then you can use ReaVoice just like this to create
multiple harmonies.
