Hi,
Most people ask how to remove distortion, but I’m not sure if its been asked how to apply a distortion effect to a voice recording to give it that sort of synthesized sound. I can’t think of any way to explain what I mean other than to give a concrete example…Daft Punk’s famous song “One More Time”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH-0s0pRleg&feature=channel
I looked at the included effects in Audacity, and it doesnt seem like any of them can achieve this effect. Anybody know how?
That’s a Vocoder (or equivalent) effect. Also see: Cher “Believe” and that silly Geico commercial.
The object is to have the character, not the pitch, of your voice modulate a musical instrument, so by definition, each effect has at least two tracks going in.
Somebody found a vocoder plugin for Audacity once. Search/Google your brains out.
Koz
Hm, so are you saying that if I wanted to apply this effect to some singing, I would have to have a separate track with some instrument playing the same pitches? On the same note, what instrument is being used in that Daft Punk song?
A final question, I attempted to install the VST enabler so I could use VST plugins, but it didnt seem to work. I installed the vst bridge, which placed the dll in my audacity plugins folder, and then placed the vocoder dll in the plugins folder, but on launch my effects menu didnt change at all…
<<<Hm, so are you saying that if I wanted to apply this effect to some singing, I would have to have a separate track with some instrument playing the same pitches?>>>
Yes, you need your singing and the musical instrument, but it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you can hit pitch or not. That’s the job of the musical instrument. The silly metaphor is to regard the trumpet mute. Good trumpet players can simulate a human voice by carefully manipulating the mute and appropriate playing. What the software does is remove the bell of the trumpet (and the mute) and put your mouth and lips in there instead.
<<>>
Not all plugins work with Audacity because Audacity does not allow highly customized plugin control panels. Not all VST plugins work because not everybody can write a VST–although many people try.
At this instant, we’re even. I would be searching the forum for more information and Googling for the same thing. You go. I’ll wait here.
Koz
There is a LADSPA vocoder plug-in that works well with Audacity (I don’t personally recommend VST effects for Audacity as a lot of people have problems with them, and most effects can be produced with LADSPA or Nyquist effects, both of which Audacity supports much better than VST).
Go to this page and (after reading about how to use the effect) follow the links to download the LADSPA version. Place the plug-in in your Audacity Plugin folder.
http://www.sirlab.de/linux/descr_vocoder.html
Note that the downloaded file must be “unzipped” with a suitable program before being placed in the plugins folder.