Distortion on vocals

S

sondriven

New member
Just curious on what ya'll use for distortion on some of your vocal parts. I have not really been able to find anything that can really work well. I have only a Pod and a couple Boss Pedals and a Korg Multi-FX pedal. Yes, these are guitar effects, but dont know what else i can try. Any suggestions?

sondriven
 
Umm, why? What are you trying to accomplish? Try hitting your converters at about +10 above thier limit... distortion at its finest.
 
tubedude said:
Umm, why? What are you trying to accomplish? Try hitting your converters at about +10 above thier limit... distortion at its finest.
Click to expand...

I dont know what you mean by converters, but I really like (if youre familiar with) Joy Drop's vocals on the song "beautiful", when the chorus kicks in "Im beautiful like me", I love that distortion vocal effect. I cant seem to reproduce it. All my efforts seem to be to harsh of a distortion.

sondriven
 
Send the sound to a guitar amp, then mic the amp. I got a great "Welcome to Mcdonalds, may I take your order?" kind of sound through a 8 combo, good fun!!!!
 
I've gotten decent distortion on vocals by just running them through an analogue mixing board in the red. Play with how much you clip to get the sound you want.
 
I've used guitar FX (stomp box and plugins) on vocal tracks and gotten things to sound quite distorted. Mess with the EQ too.

Queue
 
I almost forgot one. Sing through a megaphone with the megaphone pointed at a microphone. Trey Anastasio uses this one for "Fee".
 
Here something I did....

Copy a vocal track, distort one of them, pan left, then pan the other unaffected clean track right. For the distortion I was using "amp sim lite" from the Cakewalk FX series. Sounded good to me. Sounds like this:

www.mp3.com/psychostick

Listen to :57 of "Fake My Own Death and Go Platinum"

the vocal line is, "What if I could live, and they all would think I'm dead? Oh just what if I could have...."
 
That song rocked asi9!

What did you use on the guitars? Was it a real amp? Anyway that sounded great!

I like the distorted vocal track, but I think im looking for even more fuzz. BTW, what did you use for the vocals?

Good Job,

sondriven
 
Well, I have a boss GT-3, and a buncha plug-ins for cpu too. Let me tell you, the Boss does wonders for guitar AND vocals. I'm not going for pro sound, though it sounds like that on the recordings, however not like that live, but it sure as hell sounds fine to any non brilliantly ear trained people. (i'm not saying I am). CHeck it out, its raw.

I enjoy putting Metalizers, Flangers, Wa's, and some nice bare distortion can be a really cool effect (check out track 9 on the At The Drive In cd, it's great example of that). Chorus is always a nice lil fun thing to do, and I guess ring modulators are a bit strong sometimes, but can really really make you sound robotic and neat. Its sorta cool to fool around with the Antares Mic Modeler plug in I have too. Ow my cat just jumped onto my crotch from a 5 foot higher shelve, that really really hurt. I don't know why I just posted that, but it hurt and I think I need credit. Well, anyway, also check out effects packages such as Waves Gold Bundle, it'll have all the cool plugins you'll need for voice. However, I'd recommend the Boss GT-3 for VOCALS AND GUITAR above any pod, any day (i think line 6 is just too computerised, the boss has way many more banks, and all sortsa cool effects to put on your vocals, in cluding harmonizing on 3'rds, 5ths, octaves, pitchshifts, metalizers, ring modulators, flanges, choruses, several different types of each, and way more, and no, I don't work for them, I just really like this product in particular, can get it at Zzounds for like 3 hundred)

For cleaning up I just use compression (of course) and reverb.

Peace Out
 
woah

ASI9 man, that was awsome. Whats your set up?? what do you use for recording, mixing, etc.?? What amp and stuff?? I'm sorry, I'm impressed, and how do you get such a good mix?? Mine aren't any good, though I'm on my first year, and how did you record it??

that was really cool man, mad props to you on that =). dude do you have aol instant messenger or email man?
 
Hey, thanks!!!

Well, I'd be glad to fess up, since if it wasn't for the site and these forums, those recordings wouldn't have been sounding half that good!!!

Recorded using Cakewalk with a s***load of plugins, and Soundforge (man, I love that program, you can do some serious cleaning up of stuff)

Drums: To confess we cheated, we did all drum tracks at a local studio with a guy that knows how to do some good drum mic-age. When your drummer knows his stuff, it only takes a few takes, it will only cost you a couple hundred bucks. Cost us 150 to do 5 song's drum tracks.

Bass: Direct. Multiband compressor on the lower end to make it fuller and more centered.

Guitar: 4 tracks... 2 of them using Line 6 Insane setting panned hard right and hard left, and 2 tracks through a DOD death metal distortion pedal, into POD on the clean channel using the 4x 12 speaker sims (also panned hard right and left). The two tones compliment eachother.

Vox: Used an Oktava MC319, I believe. Sounds really good on our singers voice.

Other significant things done:
-I made one track that was basically a 'mixdown' of the drums, put a 100% wet reverb on it, and barely brought that track up in the mix. Added a lot of life to the drums, and sparkle to the cymbals, snare, and toms. Makes the reverb on the kit as a whole much more believable, rather than trying to put verb on individual tracks.

-Like I said, copy a vocal track, distort one, then pan them opposite directions.

-Oh yeah, the beginning: the original unprocessed sound is a midi file of the first riff of the song. It was double, one was distored and panned right, the other had flange added to it and panned left. It crossfades into the actual guitar playing the riff. The soundclip is from "Worms: Argmageddon"

-at 0:26, 1:31, and 3:00, one of the panned right guitar tracks (the DOD Deathmetal track) has a flanger with a wah-like attribute to it added.... it's a Sonic Foundry's flange, it has a "wah" flange, and it sounded cool, so I used it.

-The "walking... walking... walking..." at the end is distorted, the alternates between centered and sterio using the delay and pan trick. Also, when it's centered, there's a slight flange going up, and when in "sterio", there's a flange going down. When we were making an mp3 of this, for some reason it got cut off early, it actually does that repeatedly in a fade out, like 10 times.

-I also added compression to the mix to try to make it louder. Bad idea, there's some totally obvious pumping at points. I'll leave that to the mastering guys when this goes on our full length cd.

I hope that answers your questions, can't think of anything else that you might be wondering. We plan to go back and redo the bass lines, though... our bassist just got a new bass with good pickups and better intonation for the key we play in, and we want to try micing his new cab and mixing that with a direct signal.

Thanks for the kind words, too.... it's nice to know that I'm doing something RIGHT!!!
 
Yea, i was about to say, if those drums were recorded by you, then I'm taking a small airplane to your house and photographing your house, getting your autograph on it.
 
asi9 said:


Guitar: 4 tracks... 2 of them using Line 6 Insane setting panned hard right and hard left, and 2 tracks through a DOD death metal distortion pedal, into POD on the clean channel using the 4x 12 speaker sims (also panned hard right and left). The two tones compliment eachother.
Click to expand...

Did you double the guitar and have to record it twice?
 
actually....

Recorded the guitars FOUR times. Two different takes each of two different tones. Gives an "army of guitars" sound. The drawback is that you better know how to play that song, and play as tight as you can with the original guitar track.
 
Well, mainly from hours upon hours of reading articles and making/reading posts in forums (mainly these) combined with plenty of experimentation.

I do a lot to everyone here on HR.com
 
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