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Voices can be bussed separately if you wish.

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When it comes to creating harmony parts, either a good knowledge of music theory or plenty of time for trial and error can get you a long way. Indeed, if you’re working exclusively with MIDI, one of the two is often enough.

But what if you’re dealing with audio? If you’ve only got a lead melody to work with or you need to prepare parts for other musicians, most pitchshifting software is very slow and cumbersome. There are a couple of exceptions – Celemony’s Melodyne can turn in excellent harmonies, and TC Helicon’s Harmony 4 is a more specialised solution for TDM and PowerCore users – but you don’t exactly have a lot of choice.

It’s good news, then, that German developers Zplane.development have got on the case. Known for creating technologies that are used in other companies’ applications (Ableton and Steinberg are clients), they’ve now produced Vielklang, a one-stop harmony creation plug in. On first glance, you might suspect that vielklang would be an effects plug-in, but it is, in fact, a software instrument.

The reasons for this will become apparent when we get into the details, but first up let’s look at the basics. Vielklang performs two broad roles: it detects the melodic content of monophonic sounds and synthesizes up to three additional voices. Its analysis engine uses a set of harmonic rules and templates (including voice-leading techniques) to produce estimated harmony parts, and these show up as colour-coded note parts in the piano roll window alongside the original melody (which is always orange). These can be modified in various ways: you can define specific scales, intervals, the spread of the harmonies and how they ‘sit’ in relation to the melody.

All of the action happens within one plug-in window, parts of which can be folded away. And, by default, all voices are blended (using the level and pan controls) into a stereo mix. Voices can be bussed separately if you want, though, and the VST plug-in (though not the AU one) also benefits from the option to output the parts as MIDI.

Modes

When you first import an audio file, it’s analysed for tempo, key and tuning data. You then have three harmonising modes: Intelligent, Parallel and Edit, the last of which has no pitch constraints and is best used once you’ve applied one of the other modes. The difference between the first two modes is quite simple: Parallel applies standard key-dependent intervals and Intelligent uses the voice-leading concept we mentioned above. This employs various techniques (avoiding parallel fifths, for example) to ensure that the harmony parts sit more naturally.