Baby Audio’s Humanoid offers a fun and inviting premise. While many vocal modification plugins aim to refine, enhance, or subtly tweak vocals while keeping them as natural and transparent as possible, BABY Audio’s Humanoid, however, takes a completely different approach. Designed for robotic chaos, this plugin isn’t about subtlety—it’s about pushing vocals as far into the digital realm as possible, even if that means breaking them completely. And that’s exactly what makes it so exciting.
If you’ve ever wanted to transform a vocal into something that sounds straight out the year 3000, this is the plugin for you. With a rich selection of presets, deep customization, and a powerful synthesis engine, Humanoid delivers an endless array of creative possibilities. Let your inner robot fly.
Baby Audio Humanoid Features – 5/5
Pitch Control: Shaping the Voice
At its core, Humanoid is built around extreme vocal manipulation, and the Pitch module plays a key role in this transformation. It offers three modes to help you control how vocals interact with the plugin:
• Scale Mode: Automatically hard tunes the pitch to a selected musical key, helping any vocalist embrace their inner Cher.
• Note Mode: Lets you manually select which notes should be used via the digital keyboard interface, giving more precision over pitch control.
• MIDI Mode: Control your vocals via midi, allowing for harmonies and endless variations.
Each of these modes offers its own flavor of pitch correction and transformation, from subtle tuning tweaks to complete robotic reinvention.
Synthesizer Engine: The Heart of Humanoid
Where Humanoid really shines is in its built-in synthesis engine. This section takes the pitch of your vocal and completely resynthesizes it using over 50 different waveform styles, ranging from classic waveforms like Square, Saw and Triangle to more unique options like “Sassy Robot” and “Droids 4 Us.” Because of this, it’s virtually impossible to get something that sounds naturally human, which is the entire point. If you want something transparent and human like, this isn’t for you.
Con el Transform knob, you can blend between your original voice and the synthetic waveform, creating a seamless fusion of human and machine. Additional controls like Shape, Stretch, Octave, and Note Shift give you deep control over how the synth elements interact with the vocal. Whether you want a slightly robotic tinge or a full-on cyborg choir, this section has you covered.
Filter Section: Fine-Tuning the Sound
To shape the final output, Humanoid includes a Filter section with high-pass, low-pass, and mid-band controls. Unlike traditional filters, these operate on the processed signal, allowing for sharp frequency cuts and shaping that feel unique to this plugin. Whether you need to smooth out a harsh robotic effect or emphasize a certain frequency range, this section provides plenty of flexibility.
Effects: Adding the Final Touches
Humanoid also includes a handful of fun and useful effects to take your processed vocals even further:
• Widen: Expands the stereo image for a fuller, more spacious sound.
• Warble: Adds pitch modulation, creating a vibrato or glitch-like effect.
• Freeze: Grabs a section of the incoming signal and loops it for glitch style effects. Perfect for doing granular like effects on the input vocals.
These effects allow for even more creative tweaking, ensuring that no two processed vocals sound alike.
Ease of Use – 4/5
Humanoid’s interface is sleek, modern, and incredibly easy to navigate. When you load it up, a preset is already active, giving you an instant taste of its capabilities. Preset browsing is simple, with left and right arrow keys letting you quickly cycle through options.
Every section is clearly labeled, making it easy to experiment and tweak settings. The only potential downside for beginners is the lack of built-in tooltips to explain what each control does. This is a nitpick, but as Ease of Use scores whether or not this could be understood by a complete music newbie, if you’re unfamiliar with the some of terms, BABY Audio offers a detailed manual. This will help you get started and honestly, half the fun of this plugin is just twisting knobs and seeing what happens.
For deeper tweaking, clicking on the gear icons next to certain controls reveals advanced options, offering even more fine-tuned customization.
Humanoid is available in VST, VST3, AU, and AAX formats, making it compatible with most DAWs on both Windows and macOS. It’s also seemed to be light on CPU and did not slow down my DAW, which is impressive especially considering how much real-time processing is happening under the hood. Even when applying extreme effects, the performance for me remained stable.
Sound – 5/5
As I mentioned before, Humanoid isn’t designed to make vocals sound natural—and that’s the whole point. If you want transparency, look elsewhere. This plugin is about warping, twisting, and completely reinventing vocal lines.
The level of transformation depends entirely on how extreme you want to go. You can *try* to use it subtly, dialing down the wet/dry to be mostly dry, thus adding a robotic underlayer beneath a natural voice, or you can do what it’s meant for and push it to the absolute limit, turning vocals into something unrecognizable. In some cases, all that remains is the melody, with the original vocal texture completely obliterated.
One of the coolest things about Humanoid is that it doesn’t just work on vocals. Running instruments through it—whether synths, guitars, or even drums—can lead to some wild, unexpected results. This makes it an excellent tool for experimental producers who love to push sonic boundaries.
The processing engine is clean and artifact-free, even at extreme settings. The FFT-based re-tuning ensures smooth, high-quality output, so no matter how crazy your settings get, the sound remains crisp and usable.
Value – 5/5
Humanoid retails for $129, but it’s often on sale for $79—which makes it well worth its asking price. Given its unique approach to vocal processing and the sheer range of creative possibilities, it offers fantastic value for money.
There are other vocal processors out there sure, but few focus so heavily on synthetic transformation. If you’re an electronic producer, sound designer, or just someone who loves weird, futuristic vocal effects, this plugin is more than worth it.
Veredicto final
Humanoid is an absolute blast to use. Whether you’re making experimental electronic music, trying to chase down that lovely Daft Punk robot sound, or just want to add an extra layer of weirdness to your tracks, this plugin delivers. It’s intuitive, powerful, and packed with creative potential.
With its blend of hard-tuned robotic vocals, resynthesized waveforms, and wild effects, it’s more than just a vocal processor—it’s an instrument that invites exploration and experimentation. If you love pushing the boundaries of sound design, this is a must-have.
Final Score: 4.75/5
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