Tips for altering vocals?

Dirk Diggler

New member
I'm looking into ways to "alter" vocals using effects, and I'm wondering if people here might care to share any general tips or cool ideas they've learned.

I'm also interested in learning techniques professional engineers use.

For instance: what effects did they use on Bono's voice in "Zoo Station"? Zoo Station

Or Doug Pinnick's (King's X) voice in the chorus of "The Big Picture"? The Big Picture

How did they make Imogen Heap's voice sound "mechanical" in "Hide and Seek"? Hide and Seek

How can you make a singer's voice sound darker, more "sinister"? Chorus plus pitch-shift maybe? Vocoder?

Really I'm just interested in learning from people here, so anything you might want to share on the subject would be interesting to me.

Thanks!
 
Off the top of my head, Hide and Seek is a Vocoder. Tons of keyboards come with them, but I don't know which she used. (You can see it in live videos of the song)
 
Both the U2 and the Kings X sound like mostly just distortion. There's some reverb and/or short delay, too, but the bulk of the "effect" is just distortion. The Kings X one is pretty severely distorted (at least at the point I skipped to) so that you lose almost all of the intelligibility and it almost sounds like another guitar. The U2 isn't blasted quite that hard.

Edit - But what they actually probably did was either "I have this sound in my head, what do I need to do to achieve it?" or "What happens if I do this?" We could help you with the first one if you can gives us a detailed description of what specifically you want. For the other, really just start putting things on the vocals and messing the knobs. You might not get anything you like, but you will learn something, and maybe get a couple laughs. Otherwise like I could just blurt out random effects to try, but why?
 
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