User Guide

Chapter 11: Working With Audio
287
In this dialog, there are 3 types of harmony that we can choose from:
1. Melody Pitch Tracking only (this would change the pitch of our singing to the correct pitches found on the
MIDI Melody track).
2. Harmonize to the MIDI Melody. This applies a 1-4 part audio harmony – turning your singing track into a
harmony singing quartet.
3. Harmonize to the chords of the song. If your song doesn’t have a MIDI melody, you can still create a vocal
harmony, based only on the chords of the song.
Let’s harmonize to the MIDI melody, so choose the radio button with that title.
Then select Harmony type “131 Four Freshmen 4 part
Vocal Harmony.”
This is a 4 part harmony that includes the melody, and one of the voices is above the melody.
Since we want to harmonize the entire song, choose “Whole Song.” The output can be mono
or stereo. Since we’re making a 4-part harmony, and we want to hear the voices panned across
our stereo speakers, we choose STEREO here.
We want Band-in-a-Box to play our files directly, and since Band-in-a-
Box plays only one WAV file at a time, we won’t be exporting the
4 voices as separate WAV files, and we don’t select the “Output (Export) as separate WAV file” option.
Press OK, and this launches the TC Helicon Harmony dialog, which lets you control the sound of
your harmonies.
Let’s examine the various sliders on this dialog, as they apply to our “Listen 4 part Harmony” File.
The “Dry Voice Level” slider is the level of our original voice. We can make the harmony to include more of our
original voice by raising this slider. Set it half way up (to 12dB).
The 4 columns labeled Melody, Voice 2, Voice 3, and Voice 4- 8va are the 4 part MIDI harmony that will be
transformed to an audio harmony using our original voice. The “8va” tells you that Voice 4 will be above the
melody.
Each of the voices have sliders for “Level” (loudness) and “Gender.” The “Gender” slider makes the voice sound
like a male or female (raise the slider to make it more female). Higher pitches of harmony should have a female
gender applied. Make the settings as in the picture above.
The Octave is an important setting that controls the overall octave of ALL the generated harmonies. If the harmony
generated is too high, lower the octave setting here.
Try out the preview with the octave on 0, and then again on –1, you’ll hear all of the voices an octave lower on the –
1 setting. Leave it at 0 for this demo.
There are 3 Humanization settings (timing, pitch, and portamento) that affect the sounds of the individual voices.
Timing controls how “tight” the group sounds, with a setting of zero being perfectly synced start/stop times. Let’s
set it to about 20, to give some natural looseness to the group.
Pitch controls how steady the pitch will be. If set to zero the pitch will be exactly the MIDI pitch, if set higher, the
pitch will vary up/down with the original WAV file.