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Nothing is more essential to a song than the vocals. Whatever the genre or style, a top-notch vocal production can mean the difference between an award-winning earworm and a high-fidelity flop. So, when it’s time to double track some vocals, stack up harmonies, or tighten the background vocals, a generation of producers have turned to one hyper-specialised plugin: VocAlign.
In essence, this plugin does what its name promises – aligns the timing and the pitch between multiple vocal tracks. That might sound simple, but the ability to automate what used to require painstaking manual edits was a game-changer when Synchro Arts first introduced the software in 1995. Originally intended for ADR in film and television, VocAlign has become a studio essential for music producers, recording engineers, and post-production professionals in the decades since.
Across four decades, the process of using VocAlign has remained remarkably consistent: you select a vocal take as your Guide track, another as the Dub track, and then align the two. Working through the session track by track, you slowly pull all the song’s vocal parts together into a perfectly synced performance.
The new VocAlign 7 takes that trusted workflow and expands it into the multi-track domain. In perhaps the most significant overhaul in the plugin’s history, VocAlign 7 brings all your vocal tracks into a single plugin window. In this central view, you can quickly capture vocal tracks all in one go, resulting in a bird’s-eye view of your entire vocal processing session.
Crucially, it’s now possible to designate multiple guide tracks within a single session. In practice, this means that you can independently pair guide and dub tracks for the verse, chorus, bridge and so on, without ever needing to leave the VocAlign window. And, when there is more than one guide track active, tracks are automatically colour-coded to keep things tidy, with a handy routing map available to view groupings.
Add in the fact that, in comparison to other vocal alignment plugins, VocAlign can host unlimited tracks, and it’s now far more efficient to jump around a session’s worth of vocal stacks all within a single editing environment.
VocAlign 7 also brings big improvements to how audio clips are handled. You now have the ability to apply specific changes to individual audio clips, even when they sit on the same track. These changes can be made by selecting the clip and adjusting the settings module on the right of the window.
Another nice new time-saving shortcut is the ability to select multiple tracks that you want to affect before dialling in the settings in one go. Previously, you had to go through the hassle of manually creating subgroups to achieve this functionality.
To try all this out, I put VocAlign to the test on an old session that I knew was filled with tricky double tracks. Operating manually, I remember it taking an endless series of precision edits to shift the timing of individual words before the takes would match up. By comparison, VocAlign 7 whipped my vocals into shape with a click of a button.
That saved time let me get to work tweaking individual clips at my leisure — and that is where much of the magic lies. Setting custom percentages for match and pitch difference across each section of the song gave me the tight—but not overly produced—sound I’d been aiming for but never quite achieved when working by hand.
Of course, an update wouldn’t really feel ‘new’ without some eye-candy. VocAlign 7 brings a fresh analysis section to the table with a real-time display that maps acoustic energy levels across all tracks. As anyone who’s worked with spectral editing plugins will know, having that kind of visual reinforcement helps take the guesswork out of the process by letting you spot exactly where edits are needed.
Vocalign 7 also addresses the biggest sticking point for users of Ableton Live and FL Studio – the lack of ARA support.
While the majority of DAWs now support ARA—an extension that enables high-powered pitch and time plugins to run effectively— there are still a few holdouts. Previously, if you were using a non-ARA DAW, you were forced to route audio into the plugin via a side-chain and then record your tracks into VocAlign (in real-time!) before editing could even begin.
In practice, this meant that many Ableton Live and FL Studio users would end up jumping to a second audio workstation whenever they needed to do serious vocal editing work. VocAlign 7 puts that painful process to bed with a new ‘instant capture’ feature for non-ARA DAWs. This is a massive quality of life improvement for affected users.
Those who invest in the Pro version can expect plenty of new bells and whistles as well.
A new formant tool can be used to add some creative spice to a vocal part beyond simple pitch correction, and the SmartPitch feature offers ‘intelligent tuning’ to apply tuning for backing vocals only when needed. In a very nice touch, there are now tools to lock off audio regions to prevent the pitch and timing corrections from affecting sections you want to preserve.
Owners of VocAlign’s sister software, RePitch 2, will also enjoy seamless connection between the two plugins via an updated SynchroLink 2.0. Any pitch or time changes are automatically mirrored in both plugins, making it a cinch to jump back and forth without having to double up on work.
Taking these features together, the 7th iteration of VocAlign offers some serious productivity gains. Importantly, however, it does so without upsetting workflow paradigms that engineers have grown comfortable with over decades of use. There are no left-field surprises here, just refinement.
For studio engineers working to tight deadlines, this is not an update to skip.
Get VocAlign 7 and RePitch 2 now.
Garling is a composer, sound artist, and contributing writer for MusicTech, with over a decade of experience making music. Endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of sound, she grabs whatever tech suits the moment, switching between hardwiring electronics, programming audio in Max and digging into plugins and synths.
