Vocal Pitch FollowVocal Pitch Follow
The finger wrote:
Is is possible to closely track vocal with the Mod? I've been trying for that heavily processed vocal sound on LFO's remix of Bjork's Possibly Maybe. Sounds alot like a vocoder to me. Possible to get the NM to track like that, too?
Jim Clark wrote:
Ah, many of my favorite things, all in one thread (Bjork, NordMod, vocoders)!
I believe that the effect in "Possibly Maybe" is a (creatively-used) pitch shifter/corrector. Unlike the songs of all he droids following blindly the "Cher" effect, Bjork's have some creativity and originality.
Anyways, there are some NM pitch trackers which track pretty well and, given suitable source material, can give results similar to the "possibly maybe" song.
The NM vocoders can be used to good effect with the NM pitch trackers. As an example, I took the Bjork song Isobel (one of my favorites) and passed it through my NM patch Unvoiced.pch
It's fun to use the patch
Helium as well. You really have to play around with the source sound to give the best results. Otherwise it can get really muddy. And don't forget to tweak things as you play the song. If you don't have the original tracks (i.e. can't separate the vocals from the drums and bass etc) you can try to mask the crap or use EQ to isolate the voice part. Usually the bass and percussion are OK because the occupy a different part of the spectrum than the voice and therefore don't cause distortion of the vocoded voice. What really screws things up are accompanying guitars and synths. They sit in the same spectral space as the voice and screw things up. So songs (like Isobel) which just have a singer, a bassline, and some drums work best. For example, Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega works well as pitch-tracker/vocoder source material. For some examples of creative uses of NM pitch shifters, listen to
AbstractSympathy
a song completely done by passing stuff through a pitch shifter (PitchFollower by Kees) and tweaking in real-time.
Rob Hordijk wrote:
It matters a lot what kind of oscillator signal you put in the vocoder. A spikey signal with a little HP filtered white noise in general yields intelligible results. The formant oscillator can make interesting metallic vocoded sounds. The spectrum oscillator with the shape fully open also works quite well. A plain sawtooth or square can sound a bit muddy, so these are not the obvious choises to use. Its best to make a recording of your voice and use that as test material to experiment with the type of oscillator.
Here are some examples of vocoder stuff to mess with.
