How'd they do that ?

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teknomike

teknomike

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There's a vocal effect on a couple of recent songs that have intrigued me - the songs are: Only God Knows Why by Kid Rock, and Believe by Cher.
I don't even know how to describe it, but it seems like the vocal's pitch is actually being changed by a fixed value - I have to assume that it's done digitally (as opposed to some outboard controller in the audio path), but I just can't wrap my head around how. Kind of reminds me of a hammer on/ pull off on a guitar string.
Anybody got an idear ?

mm
 
You've actually described it quite accurately. It's a digital pitch corrector. You can play with the threshhold until it gives you that effect--jumping from one note to another with no intermediate vocal "scooping." Gives you that robotic sound. Interesting when it first came out but now it seems to be overused. A year from now everyone will hate it.
 
Thanks - it's been bugging me for a while - just heard one of the tunes, so it prompted me to post.
And yer right, I'm sure it will end up being one of those effects we all love to hate.
Cheers,
Mike
 
This came up a little while ago...

Actually it's a common misconception (that the Antares was used on Cher's song), but it's not the way the effect was recorded (the Autotune wasn't around back then - although it can be (over)used to simulate the effect now). The Autotune came out in '98, but Cher's song was produced in '97.

Bruce

Check out this bit from Sound On Sound:

That (Cher-I Believe) Vocal Trick In Full

Everyone who hears 'Believe' immediately comments on the vocals, which are unusual, to say the least. Mark says that for him, this was the most nerve-racking part of the project, because he wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what he'd done to her voice.

For those who've been wondering, yes -- it's basically down to vocoding and filtering (for more on vocoders and the theory behind them, see the Power Vocoding workshop in SOS January '94).

Mark: "It all began with a Korg VC10, which is a very rare, very groovy-looking analogue vocoder from the '70s, with a built-in synth, a little keyboard and a microphone stuck on top", he enthuses. "You must mention this, because SOS readers will love it -- and I know, because I've been reading the mag for years!

"Anyway, the Korg VC10 looks bizarre, but it's great to use if you want to get vocoder effects up and running straight away. You just play the keyboard to provide a vocoder carrier signal, sing into the microphone to produce the modulator signal, and off you go. The only drawback is the synth -- you can't do anything to change the sound, so the effects you can produce are rather limited.

"I played around with the vocals and realised that the vocoder effect could work, but not with the Korg -- the results just weren't clear enough. So instead, I used a Digitech Talker -- a reasonably new piece of kit that looks like an old guitar foot pedal, which I suspect is what it was originally designed for [see review in SOS April '98]. You plug your mic straight into it, and it gives you a vocoder-like effect, but with clarity; it almost sounds like you've got the original voice coming out the other end. I used a tone from the Nord Rack as a carrier signal and sequenced the notes the Nord was playing from Cubase to follow Cher's vocal melody. That gave the vocals that 'stepped' quality that you can hear prominently throughout the track -- but only when I shifted the the Nord's notes back a bit. For some reason, if you track the vocal melody exactly, with the same notes and timing, you hardly get get any audible vocoded effect. But I was messing about with the Nord melody sequence in Cubase and shifted all the notes back a fraction with respect to the vocal. Then you really started to hear it, although even then it was a bit hit-and-miss -- I had to experiment with the timing of each of the notes in the Nord melody sequence to get the best effect. You couldn't hear an effect on all the vocals by any means -- and on others it made the words completely impossible to understand!

"In the end, we only used vocoded sections where they had the most striking effect, but didn't make the lyrics unintelligible. To do that, I had to keep the vocoded bits very short. So for example, when Cher sang 'Do you believe in life after love?', I think I only cut the processed vocals into the phrase on just the syllables 'belie-' from 'believe' and 'lo-' from 'love' -- but that was enough to make the whole phrase sound really arresting. I made sure throughout that the last word of each vocal phrase was unprocessed, because again, I found it sounded too bubbly and hard to understand when it was vocoded."

Mark spent time alone in the studio painstakingly processing Cher's vocals in this way, and by the following morning, he was convinced he didn't have the nerve to play her what he'd done. "It was a bit radical," he laughs. "Basically, it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her! In the end, I just thought it sounded so good, I had to at least let her hear it -- so I hit Play. She was fantastic -- she just said 'it sounds great!', so the effect stayed. I was amazed by her reaction, and so excited, because I knew it was good."

Although the vocoder effect was Mark's idea, the other obvious vocal effect in 'Believe' is the 'telephoney' quality of Cher's vocal throughout. This idea came from the lady herself -- she'd identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.

He explains, "Roachford uses a restricted bandwidth, and filters the vocals heavily so that the top and bottom ends are wound off and the whole vocal is slightly distorted. It took a while to work out exactly what it was that Cher liked about this particular Roachford song, but in the end we realised it was the 'telephoney' sound. I used the filter section on my Drawmer DS404 gate on the vocal before it went into the Talker to get that effect."
 
The song "Follow Me" by Kid Rock's DJ (Uncle Cracker) is also heavily effected in a similar way.
It's obvious that this guy needed some serious pitch-correction help on his vocal.
 
Geez, you know, I wondered if a vocoder would do something like that, but the sound just didn't seem to fit what I've heard from one. So it really was an outboard analog device (with a little fiddlin' going on with the timing...). Cool.
Thanks for the article, Bruce.
Mike
 
My apologies, teknomike--looks like I'd fallen in with a popular misconception. Thanks Bruce for the clarification.
 
Could any vocoder be used to recreate that effect, say the one in Cool Edit Pro ?
 
If you follow the technique described in the SOS clip, you should be able to mimic the effect......... my question then would be WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO???????????????????? Your time would be better served coming up with a brand new "fad effect" than recreating THAT one! That effect has been SO overused I literally cringe every time I hear it!!!!!!!!!!! ;)

Bruce
 
Thanks for the clarification Bruce. Vocoders are cool, especially on guitar. One of the last times I was in a "real" studio, I used one on a distorted guitar rhythm track. The engineer wanted (of course) to track the vocal that I was using to modulate the guitar, but I was too embarassed with what I was saying and wouldn't let him. That cost me about an hour of extra studio time!

peace.
 
Imagine that!... Chers voice goin' through a foot pedal... I mean, FUCK!!! Elvis really must be dead!!!!!!
 
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