Episode 25: Vocal Effects

Exploring Vocal Effects: Vocoder, Pitch Shifter, and Autotune

In this episode of the Face Your Ears podcast, hosts Richard Bozic and Justin Hochella dive into the fascinating world of vocal effects. They discuss the history, functionality, and usage of three popular effects: vocoder, pitch shifter, and autotune. The episode includes practical demonstrations of each effect, providing listeners with before and after samples. The hosts also touch on the implications and evolution of these effects in music production, highlighting how their applications have changed from corrective tools to creative mainstays in modern music.

00:00 Welcome to Face Your Ears Podcast
01:01 Podcast Now on YouTube
01:56 Introduction to Vocal Effects
02:49 Exploring the Vocoder
08:57 Pitch Shifter Explained
10:59 Understanding Autotune
15:58 Creative Uses of Autotune
20:56 Conclusion and Recap

For Production Services, Coaching and Lessons, visit:

www.rjbmusicproduction.com

For help prepping your songs/voice for the studio:

www.bozicvoicestudio.com

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Transcript

Rich 0:16

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Face Your Ears podcast. I'm joined once again by the beloved and Admirable Justin Hoschella. How you doing, sir?

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 0:31

that is I. I'm doing quite well, Rich. How are you? The astute, beloved, erudite, and talented Richard Bozic. How are

Rich 0:45

I'm doing great. It's a bit hot. Have the AC on I don't know if you hear

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 0:51

have a lawnmower in the background here. So we got all the summer sounds here today in the Face Your Ears podcast.

Rich 0:58

Hope everyone out there is enjoying the weather. I wanted to bring up the fact that we are now on YouTube. at least the audio. Version of the podcast is now on YouTube. I think Google stopped hosting podcasts and gave us a notice, to switch it on over to YouTube for those of you who like to listen that way.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 1:21

yes, the machine marches on. Google podcasts has been crushed into a digital paste.

Rich 1:30

Yes. And YouTube once again, swallows up another.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 1:34

sipped up the slurry, and absorbed it into its mighty form.

Rich 1:46

Justin. Tell me, how's it going?

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 1:49

Yeah, it's gone. Well, I've been producing a lot of music lately, which has been a lot of fun. Renovations here at the studio are hopefully going to be finishing up in the next few weeks But yeah, I'm doing really well and I'm looking forward to today's episode in which we are talking about a topic that I love effects, but not just any effects, vocal effects. And while there are a seemingly infinite array of effects, we'll be focusing on three of the most popular effects used in vocal recording production, vocoder, pitch shifter, and auto tune.

Rich 2:29

Is vocoder really one of the most popular

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 2:33

Oh yes.

Rich 2:36

I want some vocoder on my voice. I've heard that many a time in the studio. So

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 2:41

I will say vocoder is truly one of those effects that people hear all the time and they don't even realize it.

Rich 2:47

oh wow. Okay. Well, let's dive in. What is

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 2:54

is what I would describe as the classic singing robot type of sound. for those of you that grew up with the transformers, it's the, more than meets the eye sound that they sing in the, Opening credits,

Rich 3:07

and dear to my heart, that sound.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 3:09

yes, but vocoder is basically taking, two sounds and sort of mashing them together. And that's typically like a string sound or some sort of synthesized, organ type of sound, something like that with a voice. And so you kind of mash those together and you get that kind of singing robot kind of sound.

Rich 3:30

You mean, if my voice started off normal, and then I really started to think about transformers a lot, and then eventually my voice would sound like a robot just like Optimus Prime.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 3:48

I'm not saying that, that's impossible, but, that may not be exactly how a vocoder works, but I've been proven wrong before.

Rich 3:58

All right, well, let's give a little sample of Vocoder before and after. Here you go.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 4:17

All right. So there we heard, just a simple vocal recording before a vocoder was applied and then after, and you can hear a stark difference, of course, and you get that kind of singing robot, kind of effect. And it's really cool because there are so many different parameters you can change to tweak that sound. It's almost infinite palette of sound that you can play with.

Rich 4:40

How did we get here?

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 4:42

You know, it's really interesting. The vocoder, the history of the vocoder, was actually an invention, from a gentleman by the name of Homer Dudley. And Homer started working on this vocoder idea. Uh, I think they called it a vocal coder back then or something like that. it was like the late 1920s and it was actually something that was used in world war two for encrypting messages. and yeah, so that's kind of, it's, it's, it's history and where it started, but fast forward to the 1970s and eighties and into today, and it's, been one of the more popular vocal effects, in. All kinds of different music. when you look at a vocoder, there's a lot of important settings. for instance, you have bandwidth. the bandwidth allows you to manipulate the frequency bands being used to process the signal. So, that can allow you to either widen or narrow the bandwidth. the frequency bands, which will change the quality of the sound you're hearing of something, you know, more thin versus thicker. So you can, you can play with that. noise is another really important setting in a vocoder. When you introduce noise into the mix on a vocoder effect, it typically, allows it to be more intelligible, because the sibilance and so forth get caught. by the noise and are more, enunciated. so noise is another element in there. And the basic premise of a vocoder is that there's two signals. There's a carrier signal, which is usually strings or an organ sound, some sort of synthesizer, like pad, something like that. And then there's a modulator, which is. By and large, the voice, which is what we're talking about here today. so, you know, those are kind of the elements, that comprise the vocoder and some things to take into consideration when using one

Rich 6:34

So you mentioned that the modulator is usually the voice. I take it that this is not only for vocals

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 6:41

that's right. usually when you're using a vocoder, you're holding down chords, and then, you know, speaking or singing, it doesn't really matter, into the microphone. But imagine instead of a voice, you had, drums, like a drum loop or a drum machine. And so instead of the voice sort of imprinting on the chords that you're playing or the notes that you're playing, instead, you'd have the rhythm of the drums. Um, really anything. It's not really limited to drums, or voice. You can use Literally anything, rhythmic, kind of sounds are, are usually better. because they're sort of imprinting on the sustained cord, but it's something I've used in production that sounds really cool. it's a really neat trick to try, if you happen to have a vocoder handy, right?

Rich 7:47

vocoder the way I've used it is it's a built in effect in mod X 8 Yamaha keyboard and it You could plug a microphone directly into the keyboard, and then use the keys on the keyboard while you are, singing something or saying something, and you can make the vocoder basically put out a chord of this robotic sound. while you're generating sound with your voice. You don't necessarily have to sing it either. You could speak something and just sustain it. And then as you play the keys on the keyboard, the vocoder will come out using those notes that you're playing.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 8:28

Yeah, yeah. imagine your voice, hitting that cord or that sound. it's almost like a membrane, right? That your voice is Butting up against and every time you do that, say it's a C major membrane. it comes through as a C major chord, but it sounds like the words that you're saying. And then you change that to an F major chord. And now it's sounding like you're talking as if it's an F major chord. It's a really cool effect.

Rich 8:54

Yeah, it's really fun. Now let's move on to pitch shifter.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 9:02

pitch shifter is relatively straightforward. so an effect that allows us to raise or lower the pitch of a signal. in this case, someone's voice. and it's a pretty commonly used effect. especially in today's music, I hear it quite a bit. either pitched down an octave to give a kind of, kind of voice. Or it's, pitched up an octave, which gives us that really high chipmunk voice. so yeah, it's a pretty cool thing. usually blended, I would say, um, with the regular vocal, but not always, it's really up to, The producer and the artist's palette and their taste.

Rich 9:41

Well, let's give a sample of that. Here we go.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 9:56

All right. So that was pitch shifter. and so with a pitch shifter, the controls are generally pretty straightforward. So one of them that you have is blending the dry versus wet. We've talked about this concept before. Dry is just the regular signal unaffected. Wet is the, affected signal. So in this case, the pitch shifted signal. And so You can blend that to be anywhere from 100 percent dry with no signal to 50, 50, you know, half and half pitch shifted and unaffected or a hundred percent wet with no dry signal. and then another one is a pitch itself. Usually this is in semitones, like on a keyboard, but not always or not exclusively I should say. we're talking half steps. sometimes you can also adjust the pitch by cents, which are like even finer adjustments. So you can even, get a little crazy with the pitch there and make it sort of out of tune or, slightly off from the source signal itself.

Rich 10:59

something that has been coming up a lot lately in the past 20 years is autotune. Can we talk a little bit about autotune? And can you kind of clarify the difference between autotune and what you just talked about, pitch shift?

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 11:13

Auto Tune effectively, is listening to the signal, the voice, and it is detecting what pitch, It is quote unquote hearing or analyzing, I guess, in this case, and it uses, computational algorithms to adjust the pitch, to a specific note. and so I was reading about this and the inventor of it kind of got the idea when his wife said, It would be so great if there was something that would just automatically tune my voice as I was singing and they didn't have to go back and rerecord. and so that's basically what we're talking about here

Rich 11:57

as a matter of fact, the guy who did that, worked for the oil industry and the, technology for autotune basically was derived from sonar technology that he was using for, finding oil in deep waters. And somehow he was able to retool that, and I think he teamed up with, I don't know how you pronounce it, Antares, Antares Audio. And that was when the first Auto Tune plugin was officially released. Autotune has kind of become synonymous with pitch correction. Kind of like Googling something, right? Autotune was the specific name for the plugin, but what we're doing is we're using pitch correction.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 12:43

it was, I think, meant to be a utility in its inception. In other words, something that was, meant to correct the pitch of someone's singing. and what actually happened as we've heard countless times in popular music is that it's more of a creative effect now. oftentimes we'll hear it as sort of a. different version of a singing robot, I guess, then the vocoder, but yeah, let's check it out. So here's a before and after example of using autotune. So there we go. That was autotune, probably a very familiar sound for our listeners and autotune first showed up in the scene in the late nineties and it's sort of extreme. usage was popularized by share and her song believe. and if you listen to that song, you can, hear this sort of robotic, almost perfect, synthesizer esque sounding voice, in that song. And so when we look at a typical auto tune plugin, be it something that is built into our DAW or something that we purchased third party, there are A lot of different parameters that we can tweak. One of those is time, and this is this is the aspect of the plug in that gives us this really hard robotic sound. if we actually take the time down, what do we mean by time? And so it's basically the time it takes for the plug in to correct the audio or like You know, shift it, and it makes the effect come in faster or slower. if we're making that happen really, really fast, faster than a human voice could do, it ends up sounding like a robot. so if we want it to be more natural, we want to slow that down, like the human voice, can shift pitch in a more gradual, slower fashion, at least compared to a computer. when we make that fast, we get that sort of, you know, robot kind of voice. and again, with, with auto tune, we have dry and wet. So I talked about that with pitch shifter where you get that sort of blend between The affected sound versus the unaffected sound And then another one with autotune is key signature. So let's say you're singing in the key of c major Well, you'd want to set your autotune plug in To see major so that it knows sort of the ballpark of what the pitches are or they should be. if you're way out of tune and you're almost singing in C sharp, what it's going to do is analyze the audio and force it to be into. the C major and again, going back to that time I mentioned. So if you're really out of tune and it's needing to force the audio, the time is going to be how quickly it shifts the pitch down, to the right pitch. So again, that's going to give it more of that robotic kind of sound.

Rich 15:58

Yeah, I imagine autotune was in its inception originally supposed to be used as something as a time saver in the studio. something that's surgical, like you're singing a phrase and there's one note that's off and you get in there and you do a little bit of correction. Yes, there are some people who might abuse this or overuse this, one because they might not want to take the time to rehearse properly or, perhaps don't have the money, the funds to be able to pay for more time in the studio. Or, unfortunately, sometimes people just have a lot of trouble. they just can't match. pitch as well. They need to work that skill more. And so they need to implement more of this kind of thing to make the song come out right. lot of people like to criticize modern pop singers as, Oh, they're all auto tuning. But when it's done, it's kind of like an industry standard now, when it's done properly, you almost don't even notice it because it's something that's very subtle and the technology is getting better and better. the intent is mainly to save time and to, I mean, my thought is, are you going to sit there and do 50 takes of that melody until you get it? cause what can happen is, is you could tire yourself out while you're recording. So you could also kind of get more done if you get in there. And there's one little spot that needs a little bit of touch up and there you go. Um, some people are ready to throw the baby out with the bath water and be like, anyone who uses autotune is just, just sucks as a singer. and it's like a, something to use a discredit of some singers, but I know singers who would blow your mind, who sing really well. And the pitch is fantastic. Still, when they go into the studio, the head producer or whoever they're working with, whoever's funding the operation or whatever, insists they say, run it through the box because they want the sound to be in alignment with what is popular right now.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 18:08

Mm hmm.

Rich 18:09

where he's talking about it as a general kind of effect, that's kind of where it's at. It seems right now. There might be some people who are using it, to hide other things, but it's hard to tell, and it's getting harder and harder to tell. And now as AI creeps into the picture, AI is probably going to change the game with regard to this effect as well. I imagine.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 18:38

I'm actually taking a look right now at the Wikipedia article on Auto Tune and one fun fact, here is that at the 51st Grammy Awards in early 2009, the band Death Cab for Cutie, Made an appearance wearing blue ribbons to protest against the use of autotune in the music industry I just read that and laugh because knowing where we are now and what we've just talked about. It's like that's so absurd Like it's kind of like we've talked about before with synthesizers when those were first hitting the scene people were freaking out And, you know, I hope that's the case with AI. I really do that. We're going to look back on our AI episodes and laugh. Cause we're like, Oh man, we were so wrong. But you know, it's interesting just in general, like how disruptive technology can be in regards to music. And one thing that strikes me is. Artists will take something, where the initial intent was one thing, and they'll do something completely different with it. Like a band I listen to that not a lot of people listen to, but I love, is Skinny Puppy. And so Skinny Puppy is an industrial Band and they make very brash music and one of the things they they often will do is is completely abused delay So one of the things you're quote unquote not supposed to do with delay is crank the feedback Which gives you basically like infinite delays when you do that, you get very brash very Big, crazy sounds. And so they figured out a way to use that creatively, that thing you're not supposed to do. They figured out a way to use it in a way that's creative. And that's exactly what we're looking at with autotune is, you know, people used it in a way that it wasn't supposed to be used. you know, making people sound like robots and people were like, you know what, this is cool. I'm gonna use this, as my signature sound. Like T Pain is probably one of the most famous artists that uses autotune. I mean, that guy's whole brand is basically autotune

Rich 20:40

I heard the guy can really sing though. was just used as an effect.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 20:45

So, you know, it's just an interesting, Thing to look at, but yeah, that's a little bit about autotune.

Rich 20:56

Excellent. So just to recap, today we talked about vocoder, pitch shift, and autotune, and we gave you some examples, Thank you, Justin. Thank you for taking the time today and meeting up and talking about these effects. I'm looking forward to diving into more effects down the line.

justin_1_07-08-2024_105426 21:18

Absolutely. Yeah. It's always fun to talk about effects. There's so many, to talk about and so many different avenues of production and recording. So it was great to unpack some of this with you, rich. And to our listeners, let us know on social media, if you liked this episode and we'll continue to publish more like this. thanks again, everyone for listening and we'll catch you in the next one. Bye for now.

Rich 21:42

I wonder what my voice would sound like if I put on all of the effects at once. Let's hear it.