Antares Audio Technologies Announces Harmony Engine - Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator

June 25, 2007

Antares Audio Technologies has announced the impending release of Harmony Engine - Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator, a real-time harmony generating plug-in that puts professional-quality harmony arrangements within reach of any songwriter, producer, musician or engineer.

Designed for songwriters looking for that perfect backup vocal, composers experimenting with unique vocal effects, or any musician needing vocal or instrumental harmonies, Harmony Engine provides entirely new ways to create harmony parts. Harmony Engine makes experimenting with different harmonies is so easy, musicians may find themselves using it to explore harmonic alternatives they may have never otherwise considered.

With four independent harmony voices, a variety of powerful harmony generating modes, humanization features for natural sounding performances, and a flexible real-time preset system for harmony and vocal type, Harmony Engine provides incredibly easy-to-use tools to quickly and easily produce professional vocal arrangements in virtually any style.

Key Harmony Engine Features Include:

* Four high-quality, formant-corrected harmony voices with independent vocal character, vibrato, and pan settings

* Antares Throat Modeling technology that processes each harmony voice through a physical model of the human vocal tract

* A variety of innovative Harmony Control modes, from fully automatic to individual control of every note:
o Fixed or Scale Intervals - Simply set the key and harmony voice intervals and let Harmony Engine do the rest
o Scale Degree or Chord Name - Define harmony chord-by-chord, complete with inversions and variable vocal ranges
o Chord by MIDI - Define harmony in real time via a MIDI controller or pre-recorded MIDI track
o MIDI Omni - Directly "play" the four harmony voices as if they were voices of a synth or sampler.
o MIDI Channel - Use four separate MIDI channels for absolute control over each note of a vocal arrangement

* Spread and Register controls that allows a musician to quickly and intuitively set the pitch range and harmony style of their vocal arrangement

* Humanize functions that provide selectable amounts of variation to each harmony voice for realistic, natural sounding results

* A Freeze function that allows a unique variety of backup vocal effects by making it possible to instantly freeze pitch and/or formant articulation at any point

* A Harmony Preset matrix that allows the creation of up to 15 complete harmony settings and the ability to instantaneously recall them, in real time or via automation

* A Voice Parameter Preset matrix that allows the creation and instantly recall up to 6 different "vocal groups"

* Five-channel output capability (host dependent) that makes it possible to assign or export the original input and each of the four harmony voices to their own channels for further processing

"Traditionally, harmony tools have offered two basic operating modes," said Marco Alpert, Antares VP of Marketing. "One option was fully automatic modes based on either parallel or "smart" scale-based intervals. These were relatively easy to set up, but offered very little in the way of creative control. A second option was MIDI modes that provided control of each individual note of each individual harmony voice. These techniques offered absolute control, but also demanded that you be skilled in the intricacies of vocal arranging (as well as having the time and patience to enter every note into a MIDI track, hardly a trivial undertaking).

"With Harmony Engine, we set ourselves the task of creating a tool that would let anyone who could hear the harmonies they wanted in their mind quickly and easily create those harmonies in a song or other project. While Harmony Engine offers all of the traditional harmony generation methods, it adds a variety of new operating paradigms that finally allow musicians to approach the harmony generation process from a purely musical point of view."

Harmony Engine will available in July for RTAS (Mac OSX and PC), VST (Mac OSX and PC) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a U.S. MSRP of $349.00. All Macintosh versions are universal binaries. PC versions are VISTA compatible.

For more information, visit their web site at www.antarestech.com.

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