Since the early days of filmmaking, sound designers have searched for new ways to warp and transform the human voice. Think Darth Vader in Star Wars or the Daleks in Doctor Who. It has always been a challenge to give a voice to these not-quite-human characters, but luckily, now we are in an era where there are a wide range of tools to choose from. In this article, we go over our choices for the best voice manipulation plugins.

Tonsturm - FRQ Shift
First up we have FRQ Shift from German company Tonsturm. FRQ Shift is a pristine sounding, artefact free, dual-frequency shifter engine, offering everything from gentle modulation and stereo enhancement to more intense and alien effects. FRQ Shift not only sounds fantastic but offers a huge amount of flexibility and creative freedom when it comes to designing your own effects, thanks to the inclusion of modulation banks and its feedback matrix.
Devious Machines - Pitch Monster We reviewed Pitch Monster a few months ago and it has quickly become a personal favourite of ours. The clarity of the pitch shifting, combined with its 3 separate engines makes this a powerful tool indeed. Pitch Monster is extremely versatile and can yield some incredible effects when pushed to its most extreme, or when used subtly. This product excels at creating heavily processed voice effects that still sound natural and smooth.
Krotos Audio - Dehumaniser 2
Dehumaniser is a modular, node-based voice processing tool that is especially suited to creature sound design. This product is amazingly simple to operate, even when using its more complex functions. The extensive pre-set banks make find the right effect as easy as possible, especially useful for those who don't want to spend ages tweaking. Dehumaniser comes with 2 options: either run pre-recorded audio samples through it or use it as a live performance tool. In live-performance mode, Its effects are heard in real-time, allowing voice talent to instantly react to and be inspired by what they are hearing.
Waves - Morphoder
Waves' Morphoder may not be as recent as some of the other tools on this list, it still packs a mighty punch. Morphoder offers you the classic sound of the original Vocoder synthesizer with all the flexibility of a digital plugin. Whilst the vocoder effect may be most known for its use in dance music, it is also capable of some truly spine-tingling and horrifying voice effects.
With a ton of adjustable parameters and sonic possibilities, Morphoder gives you the freedom to create some really unique sounds and shape the voice with clarity and precision.
Zynaptiq - Morph 2.0
Morph 2.0 is a fun and easy to use tool for creating interesting soundscapes and crazy voice effects. This product allows real-time morph processing between 2 input signals, and offers the 5 different morphing algorithms to choose between, giving the user highly detailed control over the effects. Housed inside a deceptively simple GUI, this sophisticated tool will have you effortlessly creating out-of-this-world results from the most ordinary of input sources. Whilst Morph 2.0 can be quite taxing on your CPU, it more than makes up for it in the clarity of its sounds and its features.
We hope you find this article useful and have fun using these tools in your projects. If you enjoyed this article please check out our ultimate guide to audio post- production: https://www.344audio.com/post/the-ultimate-guide-to-audio-post-production-sound-design
344 Audio is an Audio Post Production studio in Manchester.
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