New Software Review: Nectar 3 by iZotope

Offering everything from EQ and dynamics processing to pitch correction and more, iZotope aims for Nectar 3 to be a one-stop shop for all of your vocal processing needs.

Nectar 3 is iZotope‘s dedicated vocal processing toolkit plug-in, that aims to come equipped with everything you need to control and enhance vocal performances.

Nectar allows you to apply everything from corrective to creative processing, transforming raw vocals into a finished product.

This third incarnation of Nectar has undergone a complete rework, improving upon many of the features found in Nectar 2. Today we’ll dive deep into Nectar 3 and see what it can lend to your vocal productions.

Features

Nectar includes all of the tools you need to process vocals, and the devices are broken down into rearrangeable modules that you chain together. Nectar consists of a pitch editor, compressor, de-esser, delay, dimension module (chorus, flanger, phaser), EQ, gate, harmony engine, reverb, and saturator. Each module can be applied once into your signal chain, except for the EQ and compressor which can be applied twice.

Many people looking to use Nectar 3 are likely trying to find an all-in-one vocal processing solution. Nectar 3 answers this call by providing a great selection of presets for general vocal cleanup, dialogue, and processing for various genres of music. If there were any Nectar 2 presets that you were particularly fond of, Nectar 3 has a Nectar 2 Legacy folder that contains presets from the previous version.

Nectar 3 has lots of great features that didn’t exist in version 2. Its new Vocal Assistant tool can help you in two ways. Assist mode will listen to your audio and create a custom preset to fit your vocal in the mix. Unmask mode will carve out space for the vocal by comparing it to another audio track and correcting any frequency masking. To make use of unmask mode, you’ll need an instance of Nectar 3, Relay, or Neutron 2 applied to the other track.

Relay is a brand new plug-in from iZotope that’s included with Nectar 3. It’s a utility that communicates with compatible iZotope plug-ins within your DAW. Relay provides various functions that you would expect of a utility plug-in, such as a high pass filter, phase and mono controls, pan and width sliders, and delay time control. Although these are all great features, the real power of Relay comes from its ability to communicate with iZotope’s Visual Mixer, Insight 2, and Nectar 3, which allows you to make use of their more advanced capabilities (e.g., Nectar 3’s masking feature).

Various new global controls have been added to Nectar 3, including auto level mode, output pan, output width, a limiter, bypass gain match, wet/dry module controls, and control within Neutron 2’s Visual Mixer. If you’re unfamiliar with Visual Mixer, it allows you to visualize the soundstage of your mix and gives you control over the volume, pan, and stereo width of any Neutron 2 module or plug-in.

Nectar 2’s GUI wasn’t something that I was particularly fond of before, but Nectar 3 is much more modern-looking. It includes fluid-like metering, the interface is fully resizable, there’s a heads-up display, and the tooltips are simple, but still very helpful.

Each module has been cleaned up in one way or another from the previous version, but some upgrades are more notable than others. Nectar 3’s EQ now has a follow EQ mode, dynamic mode, and solo-band mode. A copy of RX 7 Breath Control is included with Nectar 3, and so is a copy of Melodyne 4 Essential. The delay module has a new grunge mode, the harmony module lets you create up to eight voices, and the pitch module has improved pitch tracking. The gate now allows you to set a close threshold, and the saturator now includes a decimate mode and distort mode.

In Use

Overall, I’m quite happy with the improvements to Nectar. iZotope pinpointed the majority of Nectar 2’s weak points and improved upon them. While Nectar 2 was a decent all-in-one solution for beginners, I didn’t feel like it could compete with my third party plug-ins. Nectar 3 has now become a viable option for professionals, in addition to hobbyists, thanks to its various improvements and particularly useful vocal assistant and masking features.

The vocal assistant works quite well as a starting point, but a couple tweaks are still required to get things to sound just right. When you engage the vocal assistant, it asks you to pick a vibe (vintage, modern, or dialogue), and then an intensity (light, moderate, or aggressive). You then play back your audio and Nectar creates a custom vocal processing chain for you. From there, you can go into each module and make sure that they’re appropriately affecting your sound.

I think Nectar 3’s new workflow is significantly more streamlined than the previous version, and may even allow me to work faster than if I were to reach for my regular go-to vocal processing devices. There aren’t too many glaring issues I ran into when using Nectar 3, and ease-of-use is precisely what I’m looking for in a plug-in. I think modern plug-ins should be user-friendly and capable of producing great results; Nectar 3 has accomplished both of these things.

To Be Critical

The one module in Nectar 3 that I wasn’t that impressed with was the reverb module. It offers five controls that include pre-delay, decay, width, saturation, and a filter section. Although these are all quite typical reverb controls, I wasn’t able to achieve much when it came to sound variation. I think part of this has to do with the fact that you can’t reduce the decay time to below 1 second or above 5 seconds. And since it’s a plate reverb, it will work on some vocals, but not all of them.

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