I really wanted to take KNOCK YOURSELF OUT XD by Porter Robinson and add a Nurture/Worlds flare to it. And I finally did just that.
The main changes are the addition of the “nurture” voice, which is just a pitched-up and formant-adjusted version of Porter's own voice.
I layered this with his original voice with tons of mastering and post-processing, such as vocal doubling and a stereo enhancer on the original base voice.
To get the stems, I used a band-split Roformer model, which is a neural network designed to split vocals from instrumentals. I hand-adjusted the model's configuration for improved results.
Another major addition is the subtle but impactful “aaahhhs” added to the chorus and other louder parts of the song. It's sort of a choir holding a single note, which was achieved by time-stretching Porter's pitched voice and applying a convolver to it with a heavily adjusted “white noise blur.” It resulted in that Nurture-y sort of emotional anime vibe.
I bit-crushed the very beginning of the song, as well as another part of the song that plays the square-wave lead. This leads to a more arcade, “Worlds” type sound, which I think is really cool!
I ran the Roformer instrumental stem through fine-tuned Demucs, which can split the track into four stems: Vocals (which is irrelevant here), Other, Bass, and Drums. The track I specifically targeted was “Other,” which contains everything except the others and usually includes synths, guitars, piano, and more. I put this once at the beginning of the song and a second time at the beginning of the second chorus, with that one having a sweeping high-pass filter to give an “opening up” effect.
Overall, this took me about two-ish hours to get right—mostly balancing, effects, and getting everything juuuust right!
The final sound is rich and full. In my opinion, it sounds professionally produced and possibly at the same level of mastering and production as the original.
Here is the song! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it! :)