Music producers and sound engineers looking to add vocalized synthesizer sounds to their productions will be thrilled with AudioThing The Orb, a formant filter plugin that simulates the characteristics of the human voice, and features a set of three bandpass filters that transforms any sound into a vowel-like formant-filtered sound.
The three built-in LFOs can modulate the vowel, emphasis/resonance, and drift, which can shift up or down the frequencies of each formant. You can also create your own set of vowels by changing the name and frequency for each formant/vowel. The Orb is compatible with Mac and Windows and works within most major DAWs that support VST, AU, and AAX formats.
At a Glance
- Three Band-Pass Filters (ZDF design)
- Vowel Sets: Male, Female, Child, and Custom
- 3 LFOs (Destinations: Vowel, Emphasis, and Drift)
- Lightweight on CPU
- Presets system with randomizer
The Orb
- Each sector of the orb represents a Vowel. It’s possible to change the vowel for each sector by clicking on the vowel name.
- The distance from the center of the orb to the dot represents the amount of Emphasis (resonance) for each formant filter.
- The angle of each sector represents the amount of Drift, which is a value in Hz that will be added or subtracted from each vowel formant.
Custom Vowels
- By clicking on the Edit button in the Vowels section, you can access the Custom Vowels window.
- It’s possible to change each vowel name and frequency for the three formants.
- Each custom vowel set will be saved in a preset (or DAW session), so you can create as many as you want by saving to a new preset.
- The default setting is the same as the Male genre settings.