Widen Your Sounds With Unison

In music, Unison represents two or more musical parts sounding the same pitch or at an octave interval, usually simultaneously. Rhythmic patterns, which are homorhythmic, are also called Unison. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to widen your sounds using Unison.  

MUnison by Melda

For this tutorial, I have chosen the MUnison plugin by Melda Productions. It is a rather complex plugin with lots of possibilities and features. Its advantages are voice doubling, a fully automated real-time harmony voice generation, and the creation of huge ensembles from single voices. MUnison does all of that in pristine quality while delivering great natural sound. It features up to 50 voices up to an octave pitch shift up or down, independent formants and pitch control, and much more.  

Let's Start

So, here's a simple synth sequence made in SoundBridge. Let's hear how it Let's  

~Synth Sequence - Unprocessed  

It sounds ok but rather average, and it lacks some power. Let's fix that by dropping a new instance of MUnison on the synth sequence MIDI channel.  

 

After opening the MUnison interface, we can see a lot of parameters available to control. In the top part, there is a "Globals "panel with "the principal "parameters from which I will explain the most used ones.

Voices

Controls the number of artificial voices that the plugin creates. The higher the number, the more CPU power the plugin requires, of course. If Follow voices switch is enabled, changing voices also varies other parameters in the background to make the sound character appropriate.  

Formant Shift

It lets you manually alter the formant information (in semitones). This generally results in no pitch shifting but can create the mickey-mouse effect, for example.  

Follow Voices

Controls how many specific parameters follow the number of voices.  

Artificial Voices

The plugin aims to create artificial voices that sound similar to the original (unless harmonized). Yet, they are different, so the human brain recognizes them as separate voices. It does that by detuning them, changing the formants, etc. However, these values usually need to be different for a different number of voices. For example, if you have just four voices, they must all be somewhat in tune. Otherwise, one would say that some of them sing badly. 

But if you have 40 voices that are all in tune, they could sound too similar. You can then compensate for that by increasing the pitching depth or letting the plugin do that for you automatically. For the synth sequence above, I raised voices to 12, moved the dry/wet parameter to the maximum, and set the keep formants parameter to 100 %. Firstly, let's hear how the synth sequence goes like this, and after, I will automate the formant shift parameter to achieve an even more expansive sound.  

~Synth sequence - processed with MUnison

~Synth sequence - automated formant shift parameter  

Since this plugin is complicated, in one of the following blogs, I will dedicate more attention to its more advanced features like built-in harmonizer and modulation possibilities.