Back in June, Universal Audio announced the release of Topline Vocal Tune, a native vocal pitch correction plugin that lifted the vocal-tuning engine from the company’s existing Topline Vocal Suite plugin and made it available as a standalone tool.
Today, the company has made Topline Vocal Tune available for Apollo and UAD-2 hardware, meaning that owners of compatible products can run the plugin on their hardware's internal DSP. This enables ultra-low-latency pitch correction when monitoring vocals while recording, without relying on your computer's CPU for processing power.
UA launched Topline Vocal Suite in 2024 as an all-in-one vocal chain, offering producers analogue-emulating preamps, saturation, compression, EQ and a multi-effects section alongside its vocal tuning capabilities.
Topline Vocal Tune strips that back to the tuning engine alone, which UA says offers “ultra-low-latency” performance, allowing vocalists to perform live through the plugin or monitor pitched vocals without delay while recording.
According to Universal Audio, Topline Vocal Tune can handle everything from transparent and natural-sounding correction to the recognizably hard-tuned effects associated with hip-hop, R&B and pop.
At the core of the plugin is a single Tune control for dialling in correction speed, ranging from subtle to fully hard-tuned. The Natural section adds Elastic and Sustain controls, which are intended to keep a vocal in tune while maintaining the slides, vibrato and tonal character that pitch correction can often mess with.
Topline Vocal Tune's Shift panel features Pitch and Formant controls for conventional pitch- and formant-shifting that can be blended in with a Mix dial, while the MIDI Repitching function lets you input melodies and harmonies through a MIDI keyboard to retune your vocals with your playing.
The plugin's Topline Key Finder detects the key and scale of your session automatically, saving time on set-up, and the Scale Define mode can be used to lock pitch correction to custom scales.
"When singers feel good in their headphones, that's when great takes happen," says Julian Prindle, Senior Product Designer at Universal Audio. "Topline helps artists stay confident and in the moment while giving producers everything they need to shape vocals behind the scenes."
Topline Vocal Tune is priced at $99 with an introductory discount of $79, and the purchase includes both DSP and the native version, which runs on macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats.
