If there's one company that knows a thing or two about a thing or two about vocal effects plugins, it's Antares. The makers of Auto-Tune have announced the release of AVOX 2, the Antares Vocal Toolkit, adds five beefy vocal processing modules.

The first of these modules is the Harmony Engine Vocal Modeling Harmony Generator (or HEVMHG), which generates harmonies in real-time. This plugin includes four independent harmony voices, a wide load of harmony generating modes, humanization features that make everything a bit more natural and a very intuitive preset system.

Next, Antares hooks you up with the MUTATOR Extreme Voice Designer, which will turn your voice into some type of X-Men-like power, only far less useful. With high-quality pitch shifting, throat modeling, ring modulator-based "Mutation" and Alienization, MUTATOR will really weird up your vocals beyond anything remotely imaginable.

On the completely opposite end of the vocal effects spectrum, you've got the ARTICULATOR. Where MUTATOR takes the human voice and makes it sound like something completely different, ARTICULATOR takes non-vocal sources and makes them sound more like the human voice.

To provide more warmth to your vocals, Antares includes the WARM Tube Saturation Generator. Using Antares' own analog tube modeling technology and without using too much processing power, WARM's (fraternal) twin tube models provide variable Drive control and the innovative OmniTube function. OmniTube applies the tube effect to the whole signal rather than just the transients.

Next, ASPIRE Aspiration Noise Processor modifies breathiness without effecting harmonic content. Breathiness refers to the component of vocal sound created by the turbulence of the air rushing past your vocal chords. ASPIRE allows you to smooth out your voice for styles where clarity is key or add some rasp and roughness where it's necessary (i.e. Delta Blues). ASPIRE is for musicians that aren't cowboy enough to increase rasp the old-fashioned way: Marlboros.

Another tool, THROAT, physically models the human vocal tract. It neutralizes the singer's natural tract so that you have full control over the glottal waveform and completely redesign the way your singer's throat is designed -- either subtly or beyond the characteristics humanly available.

Last but not least, DUO automatically doubles an existing vocal part and allows the doubled part to be tinkered with via timbral variations.