July 19, 2024
Kits Verified Voice Showcase: Conan Mac
Sam Kearney
Conan Mac, a talented British pop singer, is known for his bright, airy vocals and powerful house music top lines. As a member of the Kits AI Verified Voices group, his model offers a professional and versatile vocal addition to any music producer's toolkit. I was excited to put Conan’s voice to the test in this week's audio experiment.
Fostering Creativity: Conan Mac and the Kits.ai Earn Program
Conan’s voice captivated me with its depth and flexibility. What made this experiment also exciting was knowing that Conan generates passive income by participating in Kits AI’s Earn program. This program allows artists like Conan to benefit financially every time their AI voice model is used in other’s creative projects. It’s a revolutionary concept that supports musicians and enhances the accessibility of high-quality vocal performances in music production.
Eager to explore the full potential of Conan’s voice model, I set out to see how it would perform across different musical genres.
Feeling the Beat: House Music
I decided to start this week’s musical journey with house music, a genre that originated in the 1980’s by DJs and producers in Chicago’s underground club scene. Known for its energetic and danceable beats, house music first resonated with me during a summer in Ibiza, Spain, while touring as the guitarist with electronic group Fischerspooner. The pulsing rhythms of house music can produce an almost hypnotic state, which I fully experienced in packed clubs that summer.
Instead of recording my own vocals, I found a sample on Splice and used it to create an entirely new vocal track with Conan Mac’s voice. The sample I found had a catchy hook but also quite a bit of reverb and delay, which I’d need to remove for the best quality conversion. Kits.ai’s Vocal Remover tool made this easy.
After dropping the original waveform into the upload box, I enabled the “Remove Reverb” option, and clicked “Split Vocals.”
After a couple seconds, I had a dry version of the track and was ready for the next step: converting the original vocal into Conan’s model. I selected “Convert” from the sidebar menu and uploaded the new dry vocal stem into the “Audio Input” box.
To use Conan Mac’s voice, I clicked the “+” next to “Select a voice.”
The next steps were to select “Verified Voices,” scroll down to Conan Mac’s profile picture, and check the box in the upper right corner.
With Conan’s model selected, I hit “Continue” and then verified that the original sample was in the correct range by noting that the Pitch Level registered as “Great.”
I clicked the “Convert” button, and within a few short moments, I had a new track with Conan Mac’s voice.
I imported the new track back into my DAW, added come compression using the UAD Tube-Tech CL1B, and set up an aux track with an instance of the Lexicon 480L on a classic “Hall” setting. After some minor tweaks, Conan's voice fit perfectly in the mix.
Check out the results below:
Feeding the Soul: Soul Music
Next, I wanted to explore soul music, suspecting it would provide a rich sonic landscape for Conan’s voice. I followed the same process as before, using a sample from Splice that also required removing the heavy dose reverb printed on the original vocal stem.
Check out the two versions below:
Bilingual Island Boy? Experimenting with Soca
For my final example, I wanted to push the boundaries of traditional use-cases for this model. Soca music, originating from Trinidad and Tobago, combines calypso with Indian rhythms and has evolved to include elements of funk, soul, and dance music. Known for its upbeat tempo and festive vibes, this experiment was particularly exciting because I used a vocal track sung in French, a different language than the native tongue of our British voice model.
The production on this track required a slightly grittier approach to match the vibe of the instrumentation. To achieve this, I swapped the UAD Lexicon 480L the UAD Hitsville U.S.A., modeled after the famous reverb chambers at the Motown studios in Detroit. Adjusting the reverb setting to mono helped achieve the gritty sound I was after.
Could Conan Mac become bilingual and adapt to the lively and rhythmic world of soca?
Have a listen for yourself!
Conclusion
Conan Mac’s seamless integration into diverse musical styles proves that AI can be used to transcend traditional genre boundaries. This technology offers artists the ability to innovate, evolve, and elevate their sounds, exploring new creative territories.
By utilizing AI voice models like Conan Mac’s, musicians can explore new genres while supporting the music community by generating revenue for the artists behind these innovative tools.
-SK
Sam Kearney is a producer, composer, and sound designer based in Evergreen, CO.
