Baby Audio Humanoid review: Vocal tuning and robot harmonies in a fine-tuned package$129 ($79 introductory price), babyaud.io
Baby Audio started out in 2019 with a string of well-received effects plugins and turned its attention to synth releases in 2023, with tremendous success. Humanoid combines the best of both worlds, letting you transform voices into synthesised, robot-like tones, and giving you pitch manipulation and hard-tuning effects.
Humanoid is a refined plugin that excels at more extreme vocal manipulation, but an array of hidden settings mean it can also be fine-tuned for more subtle effects to give your vocal a pro-sounding edge.

READ MORE: Best plugins for music producers in all genres, styles and workflows

Like all of Baby Audio’s releases, the interface is clean and easy to read, and is divided into five sections. The first controls the pitch, quantising the notes to major, minor or chromatic scales. Alternatively, you can select a specific note (or two notes to form a harmony), or play in MIDI notes for richer harmonies or melodic lines to follow your track. MIDI input is by far the most fun method, allowing Daft Punk-esque vocoded parts to be produced with ease.
A Robotify dial helps to intensify the tuning effect, and at extreme settings you get a strong hard tune sound. There’s also a Formant dial that can dramatically alter the vocal from chipmunk rave down to deep and filtered.
The next main section is Synthesize. This is used to gradually morph the vocal into a synth waveform. At maximum settings, it almost removes the vocal completely to sound like a pitch-tracked synth.
There are massive 64 factory wavetables to choose from, and you can import your own, ideal for creative sound design. Different waveforms provide variations in the harmonics, from simple classic waveshapes through to more complex options that are perfect for crafting characterful droid voices. That said, it’s hard to know what each one will sound like; it’s a case of experimenting until you find what works best for the current task.

There’s a central Transform control that morphs from vocal to synth, plus a dry/wet for the overall output of the re-synthesis engine. Elsewhere, there’s a Shape control for adding odd or even harmonics, and a stretch control to skew the waveform, with both affecting the overall harmonic output. Finally, you can shift the pitch up or down 12 semitones, and you can blend in an additional octave up or down to thicken the sound. It’s particularly effective if you drop the main pitch down and then blend in the octave, with 12 down giving a gritty bass synth voice, and 12 up adding intelligibility and brightness. You can also use this to create a synthesised harmony alongside the pitch-corrected vocal by setting it to an interval and blending with the Mix control.
A Filter section boasts high-pass, low-pass and a single parametric band. It sits between the analysis and reconstruction parts rather than the output, so it has a direct and dramatic effect on the harmonic content generated. The high- and low-pass slopes are steep, but you can change to smoother or more emphasised responses using the Resonance controls. It’s a useful tool for shaping the sound further, especially when doing parallel processing. However, it would be useful if there was a simple bypass button to switch it in and out.
The final part of the signal chain is a basic effects section with Widen, Warble and Freeze/Buffer controls. Widen is a mono compatible chorus effect, and Warble is more of a vibrato with either a gentle LFO or a more aggressive frequency modulation mode. The Freeze button will capture a segment of incoming audio and loop it, with length defined by the Buffer dial. With careful automation, this can create cool sounding tempo-synced glitches. More interestingly, ultra-short loop times can create a pitched note that can be controlled by the MIDI note input to give a granular-style playable patch.
One of Humanoid’s strengths is its straightforward layout, which succeeds in helping you achieve quick results. But, for deeper control and fine-tuning, you can hit the gear icons next to some controls to show additional parameters. This is also where the Utility section comes in handy, as it can help you clean up your incoming signal to get better results from the Synthesize engine. Using the Range control to set the lowest and highest notes for your melody, the plugin focuses on a narrower range and achieves more accurate results. There’s also a de-esser and a gate to remove unwanted audio, plus a Smoothing control, which smears the timbre and pitch across time to give a fluid sound and smooth out quick, noisy input changes.
Humanoid main GUI
A Sharpen slider applies a custom pre EQ to increase the presence and clarity of the synthesised vocal. Here you can fine tune the signal that is fed into the rest of the plugin and achieve more effective and cleaner results. This is important as vocal intelligibility can often be the downfall of vocoder style effects. For extra control, you can tweak the Buffer size, which can increase the quality of the pitch detection, at the cost of latency. Speaking of which, even at a low buffer setting, the latency is too high for live use. However, Baby Audio has said it may develop a lower-latency Live Mode.
Humanoid comes with a large and varied collection of presets ranging from hard-tuned lead, and vocoded robot voices, to harmonic chords and more subtle thickening effects. In fact, despite it being sold as an extreme vocal effect, Humanoid is as effective at generating more subtle double-track style layers that help vocals to sit in the mix better. For this you can use the overall Dry/Wet amount, which is unfortunately hidden behind a gear icon. Hopefully it could be an easy fix to put this essential control somewhere more accessible in a future update. There also appears to be space left in the preset menu for preset expansion packs in the future.
Baby Audio says it’s developed a new approach to vocal tuning and phase vocoding that uses an FFT-based re-tuning engine. It seems to have worked, as Humanoid can sound vibrant and exciting when used in the right context. That said, singers and vocal styles can vary wildly, and some vocals we try just don’t gel with the effect.

If you’re looking for clean pitch manipulation then there are better plugins out there, as Humanoid applies a bit of a gritty digital edge even with the Synthesize section bypassed. It’s also lacking in additional effects and modulation, which are present on some competing products. iZotope’s VocalSynth 2 for example, has an array of characterful effects that can alter the sound, and Waves’ OVox has a comprehensive modulation section.
However, for pure robot voices, vocoded chords, and upfront, edgy and modern vocal layers, Humanoid is up there with the best vocal processors we’ve heard.
Key features

Vocal transformer and hard tuner plugin (VST, VST3, AU, AAX)
64 factory wavetables plus import your own
180 presets in a variety of styles
Morph vocals into synth waveforms
Quantise pitch to scales or notes, or MIDI input
Intuitive, resizable interface
Add widening, wobble or freeze/buffer effects
Fine tune your sound with additional parameter controls
Adjustable buffer/quality control

The post Baby Audio Humanoid review: Vocal tuning and robot harmonies in a fine-tuned package appeared first on MusicTech.