Bellows manual | Brightwork Audio

Quick start

Put Bellows on your vocal track. To tune while you record, turn on monitoring.
Set Key and Scale in the tune section. If you don't know the key, press LISTEN, play the song for a verse or so, then press it again. Bellows shows what it heard, for example "Heard F minor", and sets it.
Sing. The graph draws what you sang in grey and the corrected pitch in ember.
Turn Retune Speed toward ROBOT for the hard-tuned effect, or toward NATURAL for correction nobody notices.
Try the presets for harmonies, vocoder, talk box and effects.

The window

Header: the preset box with < and >, and the power button (bypass).
Tune section (always on screen): the key and scale controls, the five tuning knobs, the scrolling pitch graph with a piano down its side, and the big note readout with its needle.
MASTER: Input, Output (up to +18 dB), Mix, meters, the LOW LATENCY switch, lights for MIDI and sidechain, and the current latency.
Chain tiles: Gate → Strip → Tune → Pitch → Harmony → Character → Talk → Doubler → Delay → Reverb. Click a tile to open its panel below; each tile's light shows whether it's on.

Tuning

Control	Range	What it does
Key, Scale	12 keys, 11 scales	The notes your voice can land on.
Notes From	Scale or MIDI	MIDI takes the allowed notes from what you play on the track's MIDI input instead.
LISTEN		Press, play the song, press again (or wait 90 s). Sets the key and scale.
Retune Speed	ROBOT to NATURAL	How fast a note is pulled to pitch. ROBOT is instant, the hard-tune sound.
Humanize	EVEN to LOOSE	Corrects long, held notes more gently than short ones, so sustained notes keep some life.
Flex	STRICT to LOOSE	Leaves notes alone when they're already close, so vibrato and scoops survive.
Formant	DEEPER to SMALLER, ±6	Changes the size of the voice without changing the pitch.
Note Hold	FLIPPY to STEADY, 0 to 500 ms	Once on a note, stays there at least this long before moving to a nearby one. Stops the warble between two notes.
Hold jumps	1, 2, 3 steps or Any	The biggest move Note Hold will delay. Bigger leaps go straight through.
Voice	Low, Mid or High	The singer's range, so the pitch detector looks in the right place.

The hint line beside the knobs says what the knob you're touching will do at its current setting.

The piano: lit keys are the notes allowed. Click a key to switch that note off or on for this song. Choosing a new key or scale resets your clicks.

The readout: the big note is where you are now. The white needle shows how far off you sang and the ember dot where you ended up, with text such as "You sang 32 cents sharp / Pulling 30 cents down".

Low Latency: halves the delay through Bellows (about 10 ms instead of 20 ms) for singing through it live. Switch it while your DAW is stopped, because the DAW has to adjust its timing.

Pitch and harmony

Panel	Controls	What they do
PITCH	Shift ±24 semitones, Fine ±100 cents	Moves the whole voice.
	Octave Down, Octave Up (0 to 200%), with pans	Extra voices an octave below and above. 100% is as loud as your voice.
HARMONY	Notes: Scale, MIDI Chord or Fixed	Scale picks harmonies that fit the key. MIDI Chord takes the nearest held chord notes above and below. Fixed keeps a set interval, whatever the key.
	Interval, Level (0 to 200%), Pan, Formant, Timing (0 to 60 ms) per voice	Two harmony voices. Timing makes a voice a little late, like a real second singer.
	Humanize	Small pitch and timing differences between the voices.

Character and Talk

CHARACTER has eight modes: Distortion, Fuzz, Telephone, Megaphone, Lo-Fi, Radio, Robot and Industrial. Amount sets how strong it is, Tone its brightness and Mix the blend. Low Cut and High Cut shape the result, and Gate keeps the noise out between words. The output is level-matched to your voice.

TALK is a vocoder or a talk box:

Carrier: Follow Voice (a built-in synth plays your tuned note plus the harmony notes), MIDI Synth (plays what you send on MIDI), or Sidechain (any track you route to Bellows' sidechain input, such as a synth pad).
Synth: wave (Saw, Square, Supersaw, Pulse), Shape, octave, attack, release, glide and detune. The Source card shows what it's playing.
Bands (vocoder only): 8 to 32. Fewer is more robotic, more is clearer.
Mouth (talk box only): sharper or softer vowels.
Formant, Response, Sibilance, Tone, Mix work in both modes. Controls that don't apply are greyed out.

Doubler and space

Panel	Controls	What they do
DOUBLER	2 takes, 4 takes or Gang	Gang is eight singers, each with a slightly different voice and timing.
	Amount (0 to 200%), Width, Looseness, Tone, Delay (5 to 120 ms)	At 100% each take is as loud as you.
DELAY	Digital, Analog or Mod; Time or SYNC; Feedback, Tone, Duck, Mod, Width, PING-PONG, Mix	Duck turns the repeats down while you sing and up in the gaps.
REVERB	Room, Chamber, Plate, Hall, Spring, Shimmer; Size, Decay (0.2 to 15 s), Pre-delay, Mod, Low Cut, High Cut, Width, Duck, Mix	Mix goes to 200% for a voice drowning in it.

Delay and reverb tails ring out when you switch them off.

Gate and strip

GATE: Threshold, Range, Release and Hold. Its meter works even when the gate is off, so you can set it by eye.
STRIP: Low Cut, Body, Presence and Air (±18 dB), a de-esser with Freq and Listen (hear only what it's removing), and a compressor with three styles: Smooth, Punchy and Squash, plus Speed and Output.

Presets

36 presets in seven groups. Presets keep your key and scale unless they say otherwise.
< and >, or the arrow keys, step through the factory presets and then your own.
Save your own: open the preset menu and choose Save preset as.... Your presets keep everything, key and scale included, and appear under YOUR PRESETS. They're saved in Documents\Bellows\Presets as .bellowspreset files, so you can copy them to another computer.

Tips

Set the key before you record, even if you're only using a little correction. The graph is a great practice tool on its own.
For the classic hard-tune sound: Retune Speed all the way to ROBOT, Humanize and Flex at 0, and a little Note Hold so it doesn't flip between notes.
A vocoder needs a bright, steady carrier. Supersaw with Follow Voice is the easiest way in.

If something's wrong

Notes jump to the wrong pitch: check Key and Scale, or press LISTEN. Set Voice to Low for deep voices.
The singer hears a delay while tracking: turn on LOW LATENCY (with the DAW stopped).
The vocoder makes no sound with Sidechain: route a track to Bellows' sidechain input in your DAW.
MIDI does nothing: route the MIDI track's output to the vocal track with Bellows on it.