Sunday, March 16, 2008

Robotic Vocals with Vocoder Tutorial

This tutorial is about how to make the fruity loops "vocoder effect" for vocals
the vocoder is a tool which turns the normal "voice sound" into a "robotic sound"

so in this tutorial we are gonna turn THIS into THIS

ok then , let's start...

first you are gonna need a vocal sample to insert in fruity loops studio
record your voice and save it as .wave or just use a sample you have

and to insert the sample ,
just drag and drop the wave file you have into the fruity loops playlist

and you will see it like that














now you will also need a vst sound to insert into a channel
choose any sound you like from 3X OSC
(I just prefer it cuz it's simple but you can choose what you want)

after you do this
you need to assign the 2 channels (vocal & vst) into 2 different mixer tracks
and to do this , left click the channel (which is the vocal or vst)
and choose the settings ,this will bring you that window


now you assigned the vocal sample to track (2) in mixer
do the same things with the vst channel but instead assign it to
track (3)










now after you've done that let's bring the mixer window and see how it looks like












now insert the vocoder in mixer track (4)


now after we added the vocoder in mixer track (4)
we gotta "route tracks (2) and (3) to track (4)"
and this means we make the vocal and vst channels play through the vocoder track
so that the input is (vst + vocal) and the output is (vocoder)

to start routing track (2)
select track (2) in mixer
then right-click track (4) "the vocoder track" and choose
"route to this track only"

look at this


I'm gonna explain what we've done

okay ,after adding our vocals and vst
we set the panning of vocals to the left and panning of vst to the right
that's because the vocoder is designed to automatically recognize
the left channel as vocal channel called (modulator)
and the right channel as vst channel called (carrier)

and by doing that we make sure that our channels are set correctly
then we routed the vocal and vst channels to the vocoder channel just
to make the sound come out of the vocoder so that the vocoder can process it

see this


okay , when you do all that and press play we won't hear anything :D
that's because the vocals can't play with no carrier (vst)
so we have to write notes for the vst channel
and what this does is :

vst channel tells the vocals to sing notes you specify !!
that means if you have a normal voice speaking, you can make it SING !
just write any notes you want in the piano roll of vst and play .....

those are the notes I wrote for my vst













that's how the project looks


just the pattern of vst notes and the vocal sample !
I uploaded the project for you to
DOWNLOAD HERE





still I want to say something
that the robotic sound depends on the vst you use
for example , if you used a pad to be your carrier, the voice will sound warm
but if you use a distorted sound, the voice will sound distorted too
ok LISTEN TO THIS and compare it to the robot sound we started with
in this sample I used "another" vst than the one you listened to at the beginning
of tutorial

ok this is the end of tutorial
I hope it was helpful
pls support , and if you want to ask about anything
leave a comment with your question, I would be happy to answer it !

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey man............ thats great.. the vocoder tutorials really helped!

zal said...

you are welcome..
pls anyone, feel free to ask or suggest !!

Dario Rigon said...

i d like to know how you put stereo things on youtube.
your songs are great :D

Michael said...

really cool lesson on using a vocoder, i play drums but im very interesting in electronics and what they can do also...i use logic to write/produce

Anonymous said...

...and when you start putting anything else into modulator and carrier apart from speech signals and synths, you come up with something weird and wonderful. Pass it through Amplitube, Magneto and/or Izotope Vinyl and you run a risk of meeting aliens with their UFOs begging for an autograph :)

Back to speech and synths. Got any info on how-to EQ/compress speech and synth before they go into a vocoder so that the resulting signal would be closer to human singing?

I've been doing this vocoder thing for 3-4 years. And everytime the case was successful, it had a huge element of luck in it, which is very uncomfortable.

VatoLoco17 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
VatoLoco17 said...

what vocoder did you use???

Jimmy Reynhart said...

I got to about the second stage using some vocal samples for dance music that I found online. I still have trouble creating anything that would be considered acceptable for music. I'll just leave it to the pros I think, still an incredibly impressive method!