
With that said, Little AlterBoy is a specific type of effect with subjective interpretations of what sounds good or bad.

The processing and algorithms are all top-notch, so there’s no concern at all about overall sound quality. You can tap out a melody in Robot mode using a MIDI controller, and the plugin will tune and lock the signal to the melody you input. What it allows you to do is essentially “play” the plugin. You can adjust which note that is with the Pitch wheel. With Robot mode engaged, any incoming signal gets tuned to one note. What it does is very rapidly tune the incoming pitch to the nearest semitone, so you can rehash the “0 Retune Speed” Auto-Tune effect. Quantize mode is comparable to real-time pitch correcting effects like Auto-Tune. In Transpose mode, it works like a basic pitch and formant shifter. The three modes we mentioned earlier are Transpose, Quantize, and Robot. Depending on the effect you’re going for, it might take some experimentation to set both the pitch and formant in a way that sounds right. The formant control is what allows you to make a female voice sound more like a male voice and vice versa. By default, it moves by the semitone, but if you hold Shift you can bypass it for fine-tuned adjustments. The pitch control gives you an octave of play in either direction. The range of sounds and effects you can get out of AlterBoy is pretty inspiring for such a lightweight plugin. The buttons are Transpose, Quantize, and Robot (which we revisit soon). The knobs are Pitch, Formant, Drive, and Mix. Opening up an instance gives you four knobs and three buttons. We love AlterBoy for how simple, yet powerful, it is. Finally, there’s a Mix control to dial in the perfect blend of wet and dry.

Moving along, a great inclusion is a Drive control which lets you add saturation to the signal it’s based on Soundtoys’s incredibly popular Decapitator. It goes a bit further than that, with the ability to create quantized effects a la Auto-Tune, vocoder-style robotic effects, or your run-of-the-mill pitch transposition effects. By adjusting the formant, you can make a vocalist sound like their opposite gender. At the most basic level, you can pitch a voice up or down. The results can be quite drastic depending on the settings, and the plugin allows for a wide variety of alterations using just a few simple parameters.

Little AlterBoy is an easy-to-use pitch and vocal formant shifter.

What Does the Soundtoys Little AlterBoy Plugin Do? If you’re looking to add some ever-popular tuning effects to your collection, Little AlterBoy may be just the plugin for you. Like the rest of the Soundtoys plugin library, it offers a distinct and intuitive layout that’s as powerful as it is easy to navigate. Little AlterBoy by Soundtoys is a “monophonic voice manipulator” for vocal pitch/formant shifting, hard-tune effects, and more.
