Harmony And Tuning With The Voice Processor - Korg PA1X User Manual

Harmony and Tuning with the Voice
Processor
Harmony
Here's where we can go into a little more depth about harmo-
nies. We've tried to keep it practical, focusing on what Voice Pro-
cessor can do for you.
Harmony Hold
Truly an innovation, the Harmony Hold feature lets you (on a
whim) sustain the backing harmony voices while you continue
to sing through them. On activation (press and hold the
assigned Damper, Assignable Footswitch, Assignable Switch or
EC5 switch), you can freeze whatever the harmony voices are
doing, and they will hold their notes (in a very natural way) until
you let the pedal go.
See "Pedal/Footswitch" on page 235, "EC5-A...E" on page 236,
and "Damper Mode" on page 242 for more information.
Harmony Modes
The Voice Processor has five different harmony modes, which
give five unique methods of creating harmony. Once we get into
describing the more complex harmony modes, we'll be showing
you examples based on the C major scale. If you are unfamiliar
with this scale we've shown C major here.
Notes Mode
In this mode, you provide the Voice Processor with specific note
information to determine the pitch of the harmony voices. This
is the most direct and flexible way of creating harmonies, allow-
ing you to weave complex melodies and counter harmonies irre-
spective of your lead vocal.
Shift Mode
Also known as "Fixed Interval", this takes the pitch of your lead
voice and creates harmonies a set number of semitones away,
based on that pitch. The method of creating harmonies, using a
fixed number of semitones relative to an input note or pitch, is
called chromatic harmony, the theory of which we'll go into
later. We consider this type of harmonizing to be non-intelligent
because Voice Processor is not set to any particular key or scale.
These are pure, parallel harmonies. The most common shift har-
mony voices are the 5th (7 semitones) and octave (12 semi-
tones), ranging from two octaves below the input to two octaves
above the input pitch.
Below is the C Major scale, showing third above chromatic scale
harmony, as used in Voice Processor Shift Mode.
Black = Lead, Grey = Harmony
Global edit mode

Harmony and Tuning with the Voice Processor

Chord (Chordal) Mode
Chordal harmonies take your chord information to create intel-
ligent, diatonic harmonies based on your voice. To make
"Chordal" harmonies, you need to input in real time the chords
of the song. This may be done either by playing on the keyboard,
via MIDI or through a programmed sequence of chords
included in the Harmony Track of a Song.
In Chordal mode the Voice Processor will only create harmony
voices that fall on the notes of the chord. Chordal harmonies are
"intelligent" because they decipher the chord you're playing and
the note you're singing to produce musically pleasing harmonies.
When one note above is defined as a harmony voice (Up1), the
next note from the chord above the input note is output for that
harmony voice.
The subsequent illustration shows the harmony notes for the C
major scale with a voicing selection of a C major chord and a
single "one above".
Root: C, Chord Type: Maj, Voicing: Up1
Black = Lead & Grey = Harmony
You might have noticed that each harmony note can cover more
than one input note, or that each input note doesn't necessarily
have a unique harmony note. For instance, C and D both have E
as the 3rd above, E and F share G, and so on. This gives a more
stepped sound to the harmony as the changes are both greater in
magnitude and less frequent than when using other harmony
methods (shift mode for example). The benefit of this method is
that it is very easy to integrate vocal harmonies into your songs if
you already know their chord progressions! The following lists
the chords available with respect to the root of "C":
Major C E
6 C E
Maj7 C E
M7sus4 C F
min C Eb
min6 C Eb
min7 C Eb
min7b5 C Eb
dim C Eb
7 C E
7b5 C E
aug C E
aug7 C E
sus4 C F
sus2 C D
7sus4 C F
253
G
G A
G B
G B
G
G A
G Bb
Gb Bb
Gb [Bbb (= A)]
G Bb
Gb Bb
G#
G# Bb
G
G
G Bb