Dehumaniser 2 by Krotos Review
Sound designers are tasked to add tension and excitement to scenes with aliens, bad boys, super heros, and monsters. The possibilities to just record an alien or monster are limited as those folks are hard to find and may rather eat you instead of being available for a recording session. This lack of real monster sounds is approached by tools like Dehumaniser by Kotos.
Krotos describes the product as “Dehumaniser 2 is a vocal processor allowing for the production of creature and monster sounds, efficiently, in real time. It is designed to produce studio–quality sounds by using multiple layers of sound manipulation techniques
simultaneously.“
Dehumaniser 2 has all the needed tools on board to change a human vice recording into something completely different – and much more impactful and scary. These kind of tools are of great use for film, TV, games, and live action. Krotos did send a review copy with no strings attached.
Installation
Dehumaniser 2 is a VST/AU/AAX Plugin for your DAW, supporting MAC and Windows. An iLok account (available for free at ilok.com) is required to activate and use both the demo and full version of the software. Krotos released it for Pro Tools (10.3.5 or later), Logic Pro X, Nuendo, Live, Cubase, Digital Performer, Reaper. My review has been done in Cubase 9.5 on MAC.
Sound
Dehumaniser 2 is all about changing voices to become more scary or just different from a normal human voice.
As you are taking your first baby steps with the effect tool you should get started with the presets and change the settings of the used effects and add your own selection to just learn and experiment.
Dehumaniser 2 is your advanced vocoder that is going wild and creates that monster sounds you need when working on sound design projects. Of course, beside monsters, zombies, and aliens you can create voices that fit more robots. Nowadays movies are dark and tools that support the dark themes are of great value to a professional.
I did try this vocal tool on brass and other more tension driven instruments and could further enhance the impact, also adding additional third-party tools drives home the effect even more and allows you to create sounds no one else can offer.
Take for example a brass sequence and the angry beast preset, the result is a subbase tension driven musical element that can be used right away in your score. Really great to use are here Kontakt library like Thrill, Dronar series and many others.
You can not only make a walk on an icy road with all those cracks become a monster hunting the talent. Recording an actors voice over this tool allows also to change the recording on the fly and gives feedback to the talent while recording for games or action scenes.
User interface & Usability
The node-based system is transparent and simple. If you ever worked with a node based system you feel right at home. Each node that you can assign in sequence or parallel stands for an effect that you can apply to the recorded voice.
The navigation and setup of new sounds are straightforward and shown to you in an easy to understand way on the available real estate. To use nodes is intuitive and even if you are used to turning knobs you will be able to get the concept quickly an be productive.
Rating: Five out of five stars
Dehumaniser 2 is a great effect tool to have for a sound designer that works to picture on Horror, Action, Superheros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Animation. You can take a recording of a baby, child or adult and create a matching monster. Vocal recording with an emotional touch can be transferred to a monster giving you a scared or an upset (childlike) monster.
