Baby Audio Humanoid — A Mix Real-World Review

New York, NY (February 25, 2025)—You’ve likely noticed the incredible long-term popularity of that playfully warbling, synthy, robotic effect on vocals—AutoTune. It all started with the Antares effect on Cher’s voice back in 1998 and continues unabated to this day, especially in rap and pop productions.

Now Pasadena plug-in gurus Baby Audio have entered the ring with Humanoid, a “vocal transformer and hard tuner” processor that enables all manners of unusual vocal manipulation, with only minimal effort required.

The choices begin with the Pitch section, including hard tuning, scale selection, quantizing, Robotifying and formant control. Think of a formant as the defining frequency resonance characteristics of the physical structure doing the vibrating—in this case, the vocal tract—that is independent of pitch. Shifting the formant makes it sound like a different person is singing, even as the note/pitch stays the same.

The Synthesize section allows adding another sound to the vocal, with waveform selection (saw, sine, square, etc.), shape manipulation, stretching, note (pitch) shifting, a Transform control and adding octaves (a personal fave). Imagine a synth playing along in unison with your vocal; it’s not unlike using audio-to-MIDI functions to blur the lines between voice and instrument.

Surely you can sense the need for a Filter section to narrow and focus such explorations. The low-pass and high-pass filters are continuously variable, each with a resonance control (a resonant filter shape introduces a slight boost just before the cut, which is quite pleasant-sounding). There’s also a single band of boost EQ found here, encouraging the notoriously popular technique of excessive high-Q mids-boosting that makes such vocal craziness all the more outlandish and fun.

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A Utility section allows basic taming controls: narrowing the frequency range employed, De-essing, Gating and Smoothing (too much is too cool). Similarly, the Effects section allows Width control (wish it went a little wider), Warble control, and a Freeze control with variable buffer (tricky to employ, but so powerful). Finally, global Sharpen and Output (level) controls round out the large number of options.

By now you’re likely feeling a tad overwhelmed with so many choices and so much fertile ground to cover. Thankfully, there are nearly 200 presets organized into categories (Tuners, Vocoders, Harmony, Synth, Dryish and Instrument) that readily fuel ideas and provide a great starting point for you to tweak more specifically.

And that is the only “problem” with Humanoid— the tones are so good, the effects so modern and stylistically relevant, the cool factor so far offthe- charts, that actually using Humanoid creates down-the-rabbit-hole situations. Don’t think you can quickly select and then move on; you will linger, you will experiment and your mind will wander as beautifully bizarre and wonderfully weird patches will captivate you for longer than you anticipated.

If you’re a mix engineer who works in trap, hyper-pop, indie, techno or any post-modern genre that is embracing “vocal as an instrument/effect,” then you must try out Humanoid. Never before has such radical and complex transformation been so easy to achieve and customize. Just watch out for those rabbit-holes, and be prepared to dial-in strange sounds you’ve never used before while your client just sits there overwhelmed but smiling.