Waves Vocal Bender £110

This appealing vocal mangler lets you give music’s most essential instrument the colour and dexterity modern pop production demands

It’s hard to know exactly where the trend for overtly pitch-shifted, processed vocals in modern pop first began. While vocoding had been commonplace in more outré fields for decades, and intermittently used in a somewhat gimmicky fashion on various big hits, particularly those concerned with technology (here’s looking at you, Trevor Horn) it arguably wasn’t until Cher’s 1998 dancefloor-filler Believe that on-the-nose auto-tune became the viable ingredient in the stew of modern pop production it is now.

Since then, processed vocals have become commonplace across many genres, with the rise of EDM and its often cartoonish musical landscapes bleeding across the spectrum of pop. Vocals that – to varying degrees – modify in pitch and intensity, distort, stutter and loop can be found almost anywhere. It’s a state of affairs that plugin heavyweights Waves are keenly aware of. Their solid form in this field is demonstrated by products such as the recent voice-controlled processing synth OVox and their classic (but still mightily useful) Tune. Waves now offer up speedy, real-time pitch-shifting and instant access to some of the modern vocal producer’s tricks, all controlled via an intuitive UI.

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