Secret Vocal Harmony Trick: Make Male Singer Sound Like a Female

In this blog post I want to share with you a secret vocal harmony trick that I use to make the chorus part to sound bigger than the verse. I will also show you how to use Little AlterBoy by Soundtoys to make a male singer sound like a female.

I’m currently working on a mix, and the problem that I was having is that the chorus part was sounding too thin because the recording engineer didn’t record enough vocal harmonies for the chorus.

I want to make the vocals sound big and fuller without stereo widening tools.

So, the best way was to create my own harmonies using Little AlterBoy plugin to create contrast between the verse and chorus parts of the song.

The reason why the AlterBoy plugin was the best option is because it keeps the vocals sounding natural and it doesn’t mess up the timbre or character of the voice or make it sound robotic.

To make the male singer sound like a female I duplicated the harmonies and used Little AlterBoy because it keeps the vocals sounding natural without messing up the pitch.

The AlterBoy plugin is really simple to use, it only has 4 parameters. All you have to do is to increase the pitch parameter to its max then play around with the formant till you get a sweet spot for the vocals that you’re currently working on.

If you would like to change a female singer to sound like a male then you’ll do the opposite, you’ll decrease the pitch then play with the formant to keep the vocals sounding natural.

Once you have all of that done, then make sure that you delay the duplicate tracks by a few milliseconds to avoid phasing issues.

Think about it this way, if 2 people are singing the same part, they’ll never sing it perfectly there will definitely be a delay between the 2 singers.

So, that’s what you’re trying to achieve when you delay the vocals a few milliseconds later to give them a natural feel and avoid making them out of phase.

Just to clear things up, I'm not talking about a delay effect or plugin. I'm talking about moving the waveform a few milliseconds to delay the duplicate.

If any of that is confusing then I created a video that will explain this visually to make it easy for you to understand this vocal harmony trick. Check out the video below.

You can use this trick to add vocal harmonies to your song if the singer is no longer in the studio to add the harmonies. You can also use it to change the vocals completely into something different.

Changing the vocals completely will work best for genres such as EDM if you’re using samples and want the vocal sample to sound different.

The possibilities are just endless, only your imagination can limit you.

Vocal Harmony Trick: Make Male Singer Sound Like a Female