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I’ve been working on a real-time harmonizer / vocal processor / mixing booth / honestly-pretty-much-everything-and-beyond for people who don’t have access to a PC or traditional production tools and plugins. It works on mobile. It works in a web browser. And most importantly……it actually works well. It might not have 900 knobs covering the screen like some plugins, and I don’t want it to. I also don’t want AI shoved into anything that doesn’t actually need AI. I’ve been building this consistently by myself over the last week or so, and one of the biggest reasons I made it is for people who swear they “can’t sing” or “can’t do harmonies.” I promise you: go mess with this thing and come back and try to tell me you can’t. 😭 Maybe you don’t need magical vocal cords. Maybe you just don’t have the production/programming master keys yet. 😂 But seriously..there’s a reason professional vocals don’t sound like somebody standing in their bedroom singing completely dry into a microphone. Production matters….. Pitch correction matters…. Harmony matters…. Timing matters…. Tone matters…. Formants matter…. EQ matters…. Compression matters…. Space matters…. And TIMBRE absolutely matters…. And most people who are in any debate right now over music couldn’t even tell you a tiny bit about any of them — and I find that fucking hilarious as a music noob myself. But when you put those things together properly in real time and you can make an inexperienced singer sound dramatically better and it DOES… Give the same tooling to somebody who can already sing and things can get ridiculous…. And yes, I thought about the AI-music crowd too. 😂 If you make generative music, cool. I still look at it from the perspective of actual sound and vocal production. One of the systems I’ve been developing is a voice/timbre analyzer. You can upload a reference vocal stem, analyze characteristics of that voice, and use the resulting vocal profile inside the harmonizer so the processing can adapt around those characteristics in real time. That means instead of simply generating another song, and being at risk to get dropkicked by me and the world…the goal is to let YOU perform while the system handles the production and vocal mapping around your actual voice. That distinction matters to me. I made this for: • People without PCs. • People who think they can’t sing. • Mobile artists who normally don’t get access to serious vocal-processing tools. • AI-music creators who eventually want to put some of themselves back into what they’re making. • A friend of mine who is basically iPad-locked and doesn’t have the normal desktop DAW/plugin environment everybody assumes musicians have. • And, admittedly, because I think it’s hilarious to experiment with vocal timbre processing and see how difficult it becomes for people to decide what they think is “AI” when somebody is actually performing the vocal live. 😭 There’s another reason I built it too. I’m tired of watching powerful music technology become inaccessible behind ridiculous subscriptions, licensing systems, bloated software and plugins that somehow manage to eat half your CPU while charging you monthly for the privilege. Some developers make phenomenal tools and absolutely deserve to be paid. Others are selling a steamed piece of crap wrapped in a pretty interface and a subscription. I wanted to see how far I could go in the opposite direction. No massive installation. No plugin folder archaeology. No license manager. No account required for the core Vocal Lab. Open the website and make music. I also wanted to demonstrate what happens when tools are designed by actually understanding the disciplines underneath them instead of throwing trendy technology at a problem and hoping something useful comes out. DSP. Pitch detection. Harmony. Psychoacoustics. Timbre. Vocal production. Signal processing. Programming. UI/UX. Mobile audio. All of it matters. And this project has become a lot bigger than just the harmonizer. The website also has local news, music editorials I write whenever I’m not busy cyber-watching the world, music submissions, plugin/deal tracking and a growing collection of tools for artists and producers. Privacy is important to me too. I’m not interested in collecting personal data just because everybody else does. The core Vocal Lab requires no login, and I’m not building the thing around harvesting personal information. The plan is for Vocal Lab to remain free for as long as I can reasonably keep it that way. If it ever actually blows up enough that infrastructure/cloud costs become unavoidable, I’d rather charge something stupid like $1 than turn it into another $19.99/month subscription trap. There WILL eventually be some separation around the more advanced Voice Analyzer / Timbre Analyzer technology. Those systems have considerably more potential for misuse, especially as voice transformation becomes more convincing, so they’ll eventually need proper Terms of Use, safeguards and probably their own access model. I’m not interested in building technology irresponsibly and pretending nobody will eventually try something stupid with it. But the actual creative tooling? I want people using it. Especially my mobile people and everybody on Rap Fame who has been trying to record, mix and make music with whatever device they happen to own. Try Vocal Lab. Break it. Make something ridiculous with it. Sing badly into it. Sing amazingly into it. Try every setting. And if you use it, PLEASE tell me what sucks, what works, what feels confusing, what you want added and what would make the experience better. I’m building this for actual people making actual music. Feedback is welcomed. And I’m nowhere near done. 🎙️ Discord.gg/warlords <— community