You pan and delay up to four harmonies – each of which is separately set at a second, third, fifth and so on interval (up or down) or you can choose Unison to have a straightforward doubling effect. As you should expect, since the Harmony plug-in sources the vocal track over which Nectar is inserted, the effect still sounds manufactured and lacking that genuine human factor, however with a bit of effort you can create some very good pseudo-harmonies, particularly if you use the MIDI control function. The Harmony effect is pretty much the original Doubler plug-in renamed and the newly-polished GUI has made it way, way easier for getting your head around how this works. Now the Overview Mode makes much more sense and you’re not constantly switching to the Advanced view to figure out exactly what you’re really tweaking.
Giving up on all this confusion, Nectar 2 in its Overview Mode offers plain-language global controls for Compression, De-Essing, Saturation, Gate, Harmony (more on this below), Pitch, Reverb, Delay and finally FX, the latter dealing with the more esoteric effects found under the hood like distortion and modulation. Here you’ll see another improvement in the Overview GUI, because previously some of the parameters for these genres were sometimes defined by a rather obscure “Space” section – a kind of global control for underlying reverb and delay effects – and another box that labeled itself things like Hype, Decade and Motown that often gave few clues as to exactly what plug-ins were being controlled (compression was a common culprit). Like any presets, these are all handy starting points for creating exactly the effect you’re after. Styles such as Pop, Rock, Country or Jazz expand into more specific scenarios like Bootlegger, Epic Ballad and so on. In other words (or lyrics), the Editor is for serious vocal transgressions.Īlong with Overview or Advanced modes, Nectar 2 keeps the Genre style of presets introduced in the original version. Again, the main plug-in also has a more set-and-forget type of Pitch Correction effect. Likewise, the Pitch Editor is an editor, allowing you to capture audio with an Auto-Tune type of interface and wrestle segments of a wave file into the correct pitch via a choice of tools. Nectar takes Breath Control seriously giving you a precise plug-in to eliminate any huffing and puffing, which is in addition to the standard Gate in the main plug-in.
In a slight re-jig Nectar 2 is now technically a suite of plug-ins since the Breath Control and Pitch Editor have been separated into stand-alone effects. The parameter sliders and knobs are more accessible and the GUIs for the individual elements of the plug-ins are modernized and therefore more familiar. Nectar 2 has been given a serious make-over including being physically larger, which has opened the interface right up. Too small, and designed in this kind of burnt-orange colour and with mostly basic graphics, it looked like something from a 1980’s monochrome monitor PC. Let’s be honest, the GUI for Nectar was close to awful.
When you fire up Nectar 2 you’ll instantly see that iZotope has definitely fixed one of those disappointments – that darn GUI. I reviewed the original release of iZotope’s Nectar vocal plug-in back in June of this year ( read the review here) and the conclusion was that Nectar delivered almost everything it promised, but had some slightly disappointing aspects – hey, nothing’s ever perfect.
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