AI Vocal Processing for Every Genre: Top Tools for EDM, Rap, Pop, and More
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Published on
September 30, 2024
No matter what genre of music you make, nothing matters more than great-sounding vocals. Simple production hacks like pitch correction, EQ, and reverb can make the difference between a hit and a flop. Fortunately, today’s AI vocal production tools are more powerful, creative, and simple than ever before.
Let’s break down which AI vocal tools belong in your workflow for every genre:
Understanding Music Genres
Music genres are categories that identify pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. These genres can be broad, like rock or pop, or more specific, such as heavy metal or electronic dance music. Understanding music genres is essential for music classification, recommendation, and analysis, helping listeners and creators navigate the vast landscape of musical expression.
Genres can be divided into sub-genres, which are subordinate categories within a genre that adopt its basic characteristics but also have their own unique features. For instance, within the broad genre of electronic dance music, you might find sub-genres like house, techno, and dubstep, each with its own distinct sound and style.
Understanding these categories and their sub-genres helps in appreciating the diversity and richness of music by genre, allowing for a deeper connection to the art form. In this article, we'll walk through the most popular genres and along with the best AI tools currently in the market to enhance the characteristics of each specialized sound.
Vocal Layering For Pop & Electronic Dance Music
Pop music, a genre that emerged in the West during the 1950s and 1960s, is known for its eclectic nature, incorporating various styles like urban, dance, rock, and Latin. It typically features short to medium-length songs with melodic hooks, contrasting with other genres that prioritize musicianship and authenticity. In pop, vocal production is all about putting the singer front and center. After all, when fans put on a song by Adele, Beyoncé, or Olivia Rodrigo, they want to hear their idol’s voice in all its glory.
To that end, pop producers often use compression and EQ for clean, polished vocals in the center of the mix. High compression ratios and faster attacks and releases add energy to the track. With EQ, producers reduce lows, boost highs, and reduce resonance for a smooth, clean sound.
Fortunately, there are numerous EQ and compression options today with AI built in to eliminate the guesswork. The Collective by Focusrite is a new range of AI-based tools, which includes a compressor and equalizer with artificial intelligence built-in. Sonible offers similar tools in its smart:comp 2 and smart:EQ 4 plugins.
Another key aspect of pop vocal production is rich, tight harmonies. Typically, this would be achieved by meticulously recording layer after layer of backing vocals, then carefully putting the song together in a DAW. But today’s AI vocal tools can do more than mix vocals; they can create them.
Kits AI, the industry leader in AI vocal generation, recently launched a harmony generator.
To generate harmonies, upload a clean recording of the lead and the AI will detect its key. Use optional pitch correction to adjust strength and smoothness, then select up to 4 backing voices and arrange their parts. These can be from Kits AI’s 75+ voices, verified community voices shared through Kits Earn, or your own cloned voice models. Select your key and you're done! You just created word-class harmonies with artificial intelligence.
Sampling In Rap & Hip Hop Culture
Central to hip-hop production is the art of sampling: remixing snippets of existing music into a brand new instrumental. A key element of hip-hop music is its rhythmic and rhyming speech, which defines the vocal delivery known as rapping. Additionally, stylized rhythmic music plays a crucial role in defining the hip-hop genre. It all began in The Bronx in the 1970s, when DJ Kool Herc invented the “break” technique. The past 50 years have since seen legendary producers make their career with sampling, including J Dilla, Ye, and Metro Boomin.
Producers make beats by changing the speed and pitch of a sample, applying filters, and splicing samples together with a pad controller (just to scratch the surface.) But AI production tools can make you a more versatile, creative producer by dramatically expanding what’s possible to do with a sample.
Level up your beats with Kits AI’s stem splitter and vocal remover. These free online tools analyze a sample down to its instrumental tracks. The result is separate files for the lead vocal, backing vocal, bass, drums, etc. You can also remove reverb and delay for cleaner stems.
Fun fact: a similar AI tool was used by The Beatles to make their last song ever, by extracting John Lennon’s voice from a decades-old cassette.
Or, you can go one step further, and use artificial intelligence to find samples. The COSMOS sample finder from Waves uses AI language models (like ChatGPT) to understand what you’re looking for and help you find it. Plus, it comes with 2500 stock samples to get you started.
Gritty Vocals For Rock & Metal
Rock music, a broad genre of popular music that originated in the United States as 'rock and roll' during the late 1940s and early 1950s, has evolved into various styles by the mid-1960s and holds significant cultural and industry importance. Rock and metal vocals are defined by aggressive, distorted, powerful tones. Dating back to the Delta blues, rock has a century of history encompassing the rockstar days of the British Invasion to the weird and wild of prog and psych to the soaring performances of hair metal to the doom and gloom of heavy metal. With AI vocal tools, you can produce your way to all these sounds – or even create them from scratch.
On the tamer end, we have machine learning-powered vocal repair tools, like iZotope RX 11. This suite of intelligent tools analyzes your recordings for issues and suggests fixes. This can include removing background noises, declipping, and optimizing loudness. This is especially helpful for rock and metal vocals, who often record at higher volumes and with lots of natural vocal distortion.
There are also intelligent reverbs, like smart:reverb from Sonible. These plugins tailor the sound to your track, selecting the right one and tweaking them to perfection. This is a great way to get that great arena rock sound, without any annoying boom or echo.
On the futuristic end of the spectrum, we have the Voice Designer from Kits AI. This tool lets you design a new AI voice model from scratch. Choose a gender and genre preset – in this case, Rock. From there, customize the power, warmth, and breath of the voice until it matches your track. The randomness slider introduces more unpredictability into the generation. Higher levels can give it a more human feel, but also create unexpected inclusions.
The best part is, the voices are completely royalty-free, so you can use it however you like. Plus, Kits AI has one of the strictest ethics policy in the AI music space.
Robotic Vocals For Electronic & Experimental
For electronic and experimental producers, AI tools can put you at the cutting edge of what’s possible with music technology.
Perhaps the most famous AI music tool is Vocaloid from Yamaha. That’s the vocal synthesis engine behind Hatsune Miku, perhaps the most famous singer who doesn’t exist. A virtual pop idol since 2007, Hatsune Miku has sold hundreds of thousands of records, performed at Coachella, and collaborated with legends.
Vocaloid has been used by countless other producers to create new voices, ranging from deeply human to proudly artificial. The latest iteration, Vocaloid 6, uses proprietary artificial intelligence called VOCALOID:AI for the most expressive, natural singing yet possible.
For crushed hyperop vocals, like 100 gecs, Glaive, or Fraxiom, one of the most common production tricks is combing stretched pitched correction (with super fast speed and note transition) and formant shift (altering the vocal timbre, but not its pitch.) Legendary pitch correction plugins like Auto-Tune and Melodyne now use AI for more precise, faster results when creating this sound.
But why push a human voice to its limits, when you can just create a new one with AI? Using voice conversion on Kits AI, you can turn an existing singing part into a completely new voice. Kits AI offers a library of 75+ stock voices and musical instruments, a Voice Designer for completely new voices, real singers shared through Kits Earn, and voice cloning to create a model of your own.
Kits AI also has a plethora of options for fine-tuning and wild experimentation:
Pitch Correction: Select a key, strength, and smoothness, and AI will make sure you’re singing in tune. Push this for that hyperpop sound.
Pitch Shift: Raise or lower the pitch by up to 24 semitones.
Isolate vocals by removing instrumentals, backing vocals, reverb, and delay.
Accent Strength: Get a thicker accent from the voice model. Higher levels can cause mispronunciations, which can make for an intriguing effect.
Volume Blend: Control the balance between the input volume and the model.
Pre-Processing Effects: Cut noise, rumble, and harshness, smooth volume, and autotune before generation.
Post-Processing Effects: Apply compressor, chorus, reverb, and/or delay to your final result.
Creative Applications of AI Vocals
AI vocals have revolutionized the music industry, offering new creative possibilities for music producers and artists. These advanced tools can enhance human vocals, create entirely new sounds, and even generate complete vocal tracks, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in music production.
Using AI Vocals in Music Production
AI vocals can be used in various innovative ways in music production:
Enhancing Human Vocals: AI can correct pitch, adjust tone, and add effects to human vocals, making them sound more polished and professional. This is particularly useful in genres like pop and electronic dance music, where vocal perfection is often key.
Creating New Sounds: AI can generate new vocal sounds, such as robotic or alien-like voices, adding a unique touch to a track. This is especially popular in experimental and electronic music genres.
Generating Vocal Tracks: AI can convert entire vocal tracks, a female voice from a male voice, providing a starting point for a song. This can be a game-changer for producers looking to quickly prototype new vocalists or explore different musical genres.
Enhancing Human Vocals with AI
AI vocals can also be used to create new sounds and styles, such as:
Rap Music: AI can generate rap vocals with complex rhyme schemes and lyrics, contributing to the evolution of hip hop culture.
Hip Hop Culture: AI can generate hip hop vocals with a unique style and flow, adding a fresh twist to traditional hip hop music.
Electronic Dance Music: AI can generate electronic dance music vocals with a futuristic sound, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in dance music.
Overall, AI vocals offer a wide range of creative possibilities for music producers and artists. Whether enhancing human vocals, creating new sounds, or generating entire vocal tracks, AI is transforming the way music is made and experienced across various musical genres.
Conclusion
No matter what genre of music you make, AI vocal production tools can level up your sound and workflow. There’s a huge range out there, from subtle cleanup tools to powerful voice removers to mind-blowing voice conversion and cloning.
If you’re just getting started with AI vocal production, Kits AI is the best place to start. Their suite offers all these tools in one package for just just $11.99 per month – far less than other expensive one-time downloads. Plus, the whole suite is incredibly easy to use and available as a simple web app.
