The vocal formant is an aspect of our vocal we can adjust either on individual vocal clips in our DAW or via tuning or formant specific plugins to affect an entire vocal track. Let’s identify what the vocal formant is, what adjusting it does, and why and how to do it.
Vocal Formant
The vocal formant relates to the timbre and mouth sound of a vocal. This can be adjusted as I just mentioned either through adjusting a clip or using a plugin.
In my DAW of choice, Ableton Live, clip view appears in the lower left corner after you’ve selected a clip in the arrangement/timeline view:
As I mentioned in my overview of how to tune vocals, if you pitch your vocal clip up or down, it can start to affect the timbre of the vocal. You can compensate for this by adjusting the vocal formant in the clip view/via however your DAW allows for formant adjustments.
The more aggressively you adjust a vocal’s tuning on a note or notes, the more foreign it will sound relative to the normal vocal, so adjusting the formant can help to smooth out any tuning adjustments you’ve made (refer to the aforementioned vocal tuning guide for more information).
I’ve used this to pitch up or down a vocal by about one note, two at most in some situations, while retaining the natural expression qualities and timbre of the vocal.
This is useful for instances where you decide on a key change for a song after the fact but already have a great vocal take for it.
You’ll find changing the formant on instruments or instrumentals doesn’t have nearly the same effect even when paired with a key change. Happily, instruments don’t have the same kind of expression and most cases as vocals, so it’s easier to adjust their pitch without artifacts.
Getting back to vocal formants specifically and on the other hand, if you want to create some interesting aesthetic effects by way of adjusting the vocal formant, you’ll likely want to reach for a dedicated plugin like an autotune such as Antares’ Auto-Tune Pro or the free Graillon.
I especially like Auto-Tune Pro for adjusting the formant to get that exaggerated sound that you’ll hear on a lot of pop records today:
Generally speaking, a lower formant makes the voice sound sharper and narrower.
This is the stereotypical “chipmunk” sound, just without the pitch adjusted up.
Alternatively, a higher formant makes the voice sound smoother and wider.
This sounds more like any adult trying to speak in the old Peanuts cartoons/specials and is a sound you can somewhat replicate if you make the shape of an “O” with your mouth and let the sounds come deeper from your throat.
You’ll hear that a lot in pop music today. The 1975 in particular have been playing with vocal formants on their music and music they’ve produced for other artists for over a decade now, as well.
As you can see from the above example, you can turn the formant all the way up on a duplicated vocal, then drop it an octave and slip it 10-20dB underneath (quieter than) the dry instance of the vocal to thicken out that vocal.
I like to do this on the lead vocal in particular to give it a bit more size.
Conversely, another good effect is pairing a lower formant with a vocal pitched up an octave. This creates a little ear candy which you can pan to the side and use it as a throw in certain situations.
That’s not to say that the high formant/down octave instance can’t also be used as some ear candy; simply turn it up a bit in relation to the lead or apply this to an independent vocal track to create some candy to keep the listener engaged with the mix.
The next time you see “Formant” as an option, remember it’s not just about balancing out and correcting a vocal to make its timbre sound natural in the wake of a pitch change. It can be used by way of a plugin like Auto-Tune Pro to give your vocal a completely different vibe which can work on its own for a bit of ear candy or to supplement the duplicated dry instance of your vocal.
