Kid Rock "Cowboy" effect

[Schleprock]

We're producing a parody of Kid Rock's "Cowboy" for a radio station and I need to re-create the intro where the word "cowboy" is used. The vocal has an "electronic" sound to it and I'd like to recreate it with a new word. We are using Vegas Audio and Sound Forge and I have a POD and Digitech RP7 as well. Any ideas?

 

[six]

I could be wrong - but I guess it's a talkbox.
To get that "mechanic" sound you could try "GoldWave" (free download). There's a "mechanize" tool.

 

[Tim Brown]

We're producing a parody of Kid Rock's "Cowboy" for a radio station and I need to re-create the intro where the word "cowboy" is used. The vocal has an "electronic" sound to it and I'd like to recreate it with a new word. We are using Vegas Audio and Sound Forge and I have a POD and Digitech RP7 as well. Any ideas?

Well, there's two ways to do it.
The first is a VOCODER.
You would talk into a mic connected to the Vocoder, and use a keyboard to control the waveform.

The second method is probably how Kid Rock did it; The Antares "Autocorrection/Vocal pitch corrector" will do it. It's also on that Cher song that was a big hit.called Do you believe in Love. or something like that)
They run everything through the Autocorrector these days-even if it doesn't need it. God forbid somebody might go out of key for 1 millionth of a second! Hahaha


Tim

 

[bvaleria]

Actually that'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).



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."

 

[Tim Brown]

Actually that'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).



Bruce

See Bruce, I kept saying it was a Vocoder, and people went-No, You're Wrong, It's an Antares Autotune.
So, live and learn.

Tim

 

[prtlsy]

that's a neat story about the VC10 and all but I think it's just that... a story. the kind of thing producers and engineers make up cause what they've done is actually really easy (in this case setting Autotune for extreme correction). if they really went to all that trouble, well hey, they've got more time to waste than most of us.

andrew

 

[bvaleria]

Er, no.... you missed what I said - the Autotune WASN'T IN PRODUCTION when that Cher tune was recorded.....

*insert Twilight Zone music here*



Bruce

 

[prtlsy]

with all due respect, that's wrong. autotunes's been out (as a plug in at least) since 1997, the song's from 1998. the bottom line is that the most practical way to get that effect is to use autotune. I'm not even sure that's the effect that the original question was referring to... there's another Kid Rock song where they used autotune throughout but I can't remember hearing it on "cowboy."

 

[happy hour]

I wish I was a newbie arguing with a seasoned member.

 

[bvaleria]

Er, no.... but thanks for sharing...

with all due respect, that's wrong. autotunes's been out (as a plug in at least) since 1997, the song's from 1998.

...sorry but you are wrong.... the Autotune was RELEASED in 1998 (look at any of Antares latest ads in Mix/EQ - they even say it right there). The Cher tune was RELEASED in 1998, but PRODUCTION on that song occurred in 1997. So unless they were using a prototype - a story I've never heard - they COULD NOT have used an Autotune.

Bruce