Spice Up Your Synth Leads With Vibrato

Modern effects and synthesizers are getting better at mimicking the natural vibrato produced by a violinist playing their instrument. The following tutorial will show you how to spice up your synth leads with vibrato.

As usual, we prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most of the significant elements of a full mix. Let's take a listen to it.

Our synth lead could benefit from the movement since it sounds flat and dull. Let's take a listen to it solo.

Plug-in Effects for Vibrato

Many modern VST synthesizers can produce vibrato effects with simple pitch modulation, but what do we do with an audio file? In this case, we can use dedicated audio products that can do the same thing on any incoming signal. For this, we have chosen MVibrato by MeldaProductions. Let's add a new instance to our synth lead effect rack.

The interface of this effect is divided into three significant sections. The first one displays control parameters such as depth, width, tremolo, and tremolo phase, among others. We can turn sync on or off in the middle of the interface. Disabling it will affect the rate parameter in the upper part of the interface, and the vibrato speed can then be manually adjusted. The bottom section displays the modulation's shape, offering standard waveform shapes such as sine, saw, triangle, etc. We recommend using the effect lightly and in small amounts to mimic natural vibrato. Going over the top will result in a plastic and unnatural sound that should be avoided.

As you can see in the image above, we have set the depth of the vibrato effect to 10%, the width to 52%, and the sync to 1/16 beats. In our opinion, the sine the sine is the most natural-sounding vibrato shape, so we chose it. Let's now compare the unprocessed and processed version of our synth lead.

Finally, let's hear it in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on sound processing, here are some more on the same subject:

• Juice Up Your Sounds with Multi-Effects Processing
• Guitar Sounds Processing
• Quick Help for Vocal Processing
• Multiband Compression To Process Your Kick Drum