Baby Audio Humanoid $129 PC MAC

Humanoid brings the ‘extreme’ and ‘radical’ to the world of vocals, but is also one of the easiest plugins to use and abuse, says Andy Jones

- Andy Jones

The world of robotic tuned effects is still big business, whether you agree with the fact that the music industry still seems overly fixated with the effect – over a quarter of a century after Cher made it famous with Believe – or not. Baby Audio is now one of the biggest music software developers, having released some stunning plugins, including the multi-award-winning and at least 9/10 scoring Transit, TAIP, Parallel Aggressor, Comeback Kid, Crystalline, and Spaced Out. It was only a matter of time, then, until BA would meet the vocal effect, and here we have the result: Humanoid!

The usual… but not

In typical BA fashion, there are few controls that you’ll find on other automatic vocal tuning plugins; instead, it has opted for more descriptive controls, so these just do what they say: Robotify, De-ess, Warble and Smoothing to name but four. This makes Humanoid one of the easiest vocal tuning/effect plugins to use right out of the box; we had a vocal through it and minutes later were up to speed.

There are five main sections: Pitch, Utility, Synthesize, Filter and Effects. Pitch is your hard tuning area, with a Robotify dial (guess what it does), and the ability to set a scale. Don’t expect natural tuning here; it is dramatic, harder and way more Daft Punk than Adele.