Telephone voice?

[BLCKOUT420]

How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

[Steve King]

"BLCKOUT420" <blckout420@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030814213613.29503.00000005@mb-m21.aol.com...
> How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

Go to http://www.google.com/groups

Do an advanced search of the exact phrase "telephone voice" in
rec.audio.pro. You'll get 43 hits. If you searched telephone effect you'd
probably get some more. There are a bunch of ideas to try.

Steve King

[Robert Pascarella]

On 15 Aug 2003 01:36:13 GMT, blckout420@aol.com (BLCKOUT420) wrote:

>How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

Pull out all the bass and most (if not all of the high end)
Crank the mid range and sweep the mid range frequencies (if you can)
to find the right sound.

You can also use a plug in like Amp Farm or a preamp to increase
distortion a little.

BP.

[Justin Ulysses Morse]

BLCKOUT420 <blckout420@aol.com> wrote:

> How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

Just the opposite: A bandpass filter. You run a HP filter at about
400Hz or so, and a LP filter at about 4kHz. Most EQ plug-ins come with
this as an effects pre-set. You can boost the range just inside of the
filters so that the corners are "square" rather than rounded, to give
you a very steep corner. Use some kind of distortion effect to mess it
up a little bit, but now you get into some subtleties that vary with
the specific type of telephone you're trying to emulate. My advice is
to pick a particular phone sound to emulate rather than just settling
for the ballpark of a generic phone. It'll be more convincing. If you
care.

ulysses

[spud]

On 15 Aug 2003 01:36:13 GMT, blckout420@aol.com (BLCKOUT420) wrote:

>How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

Or if you don't like that you can do it using my strikingly unique,
patented ultracool method:
1) Open your headphones so the ear cups are pointing out like a pair
of miniature speakers and lay them gently on the desk.
2) Turn just the phones up fairly loud and from a few feet away you
will hear an irritating, squawking, tinny sound blarring out.
3) Now turn the monitors up just an ever so tiny wee bit of a scoach
till the blended voice, music, whatever material becomes intelligible
and mic what you hear. You can fade the headphone/monitor balance in
or out to fade in/out the effect if you want. I used a CDRW in a
portable CD player to play back 15 seconds of vocal through the board
so I wouldn't have the computer noise in the mix and miced with a pair
of omni's in ORTF to a DAT machine. Use what you have.
This is to be here-to-fore referred to as the spud method. Any and all
royalties resulting in the sale of any music form containing even
microseconds of material made employing the aforementioned,
here-to-fore referred to spud method or it's variants, derivative or
resultant processes shall be here-by paid to the Spudco Institute for
Audio Advancement- or you can just send me one of the Trident 80
modules that guy has for sale. Rrrrrring-a-ding!,... s, (who will NOT
be renewing his Tape Op sub in feeble, impotent, Wobbly, fist shaking
protest against their joining the massive corporate republican, evil
bulkmailer, telemarketing, demographic ****sucker scam- Boooooo,
hissss!!)

[AudioGaff]

I always use one of these. Eventide DSP4000B/DSP4500/DSP7500/Orville

--
AudioGaff


"BLCKOUT420" <blckout420@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030814213613.29503.00000005@mb-m21.aol.com...
> How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

[Ricky W. Hunt]

"Justin Ulysses Morse" <ulysses@rollmusic.com> wrote in message
news:140820032359030357%ulysses@rollmusic.com...
> BLCKOUT420 <blckout420@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?
>
> Just the opposite: A bandpass filter. You run a HP filter at about
> 400Hz or so, and a LP filter at about 4kHz. Most EQ plug-ins come with
> this as an effects pre-set. You can boost the range just inside of the
> filters so that the corners are "square" rather than rounded, to give
> you a very steep corner. Use some kind of distortion effect to mess it
> up a little bit, but now you get into some subtleties that vary with
> the specific type of telephone you're trying to emulate. My advice is
> to pick a particular phone sound to emulate rather than just settling
> for the ballpark of a generic phone. It'll be more convincing. If you
> care.

I've found this effect to have been done so much that you're no longer
trying to fake a real sounding phone but an imitation of what people are
used to hearing as this effect which is much more grating than most phones
in general use today.

[Bob Ross]

BLCKOUT420 wrote:

> How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?

I wrote an article in the March 2001 issue of Recording Magazine that
listed 10 or so different techniques for achieving the cliched "telephone
voice". Many of these methods have alredy been described by previous
posters in this thread...but my favorite is the one that sometimes seems so
obvious yet rarely gets the most attention:

If you want a voice to sound like it's coming through a telephone, record
the voice through a telephone.

There are plenty of devices on the market that provide a telco RJ-11 to
line level audio interface. Just give your singer the ****tiest old
bakelite phone with a rotary dial & carbon mic you can find, hork that into
a Gentner or JK Audio telephone hybrid interface, patch that into your
console and you're off.

(Off your rocker, perhaps, but that's for another discussion.)

/Bob Ross

[BLCKOUT420]

>If you want a voice to sound like it's coming through a telephone, record
>the voice through a telephone

Thanks Bob. I tried several of the methods here, and what I ended up doing was
having the singer call me with his cell in the tracking room wearing headphones
listening to the mix, and I plugged in a really cheap plastic telephone and
recorded his voice. The most convincing sound.

[Steve King]

"Bob Ross" <b.ross@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:3F3CB519.AABA14D6@verizon.net...
> BLCKOUT420 wrote:
>
> > How do I make a vocal have the old style telephone voice?A notch filter?
>
> I wrote an article in the March 2001 issue of Recording Magazine that
> listed 10 or so different techniques for achieving the cliched "telephone
> voice". Many of these methods have alredy been described by previous
> posters in this thread...but my favorite is the one that sometimes seems
so
> obvious yet rarely gets the most attention:
>
> If you want a voice to sound like it's coming through a telephone, record
> the voice through a telephone.
>
> There are plenty of devices on the market that provide a telco RJ-11 to
> line level audio interface. Just give your singer the ****tiest old
> bakelite phone with a rotary dial & carbon mic you can find, hork that
into
> a Gentner or JK Audio telephone hybrid interface, patch that into your
> console and you're off.
>
> (Off your rocker, perhaps, but that's for another discussion.)
>
> /Bob Ross
>

This method has always seemed to provide the most reliable results to me.
The part about the old bakelite dial phone is important. Those phones have
carbon mics as Bob pointed out, and it is those phones that established our
perception of what a phone voice should sound like. Most studios that do a
lot of voice recording for radio and TV and educational media have at least
one set up. If you throw a battery across the line... help me here somebody
because I can't remember the voltage--- 45 VDC??.... you can take a line
level feed through a couple of blocking capacitors without having to buy an
expensive interface.

Steve King

[Bill Thompson]

Steve King wrote:

> This method has always seemed to provide the most reliable results to me.
> The part about the old bakelite dial phone is important. Those phones have
> carbon mics as Bob pointed out, and it is those phones that established our
> perception of what a phone voice should sound like. Most studios that do a
> lot of voice recording for radio and TV and educational media have at least
> one set up. If you throw a battery across the line... help me here somebody
> because I can't remember the voltage--- 45 VDC??.... you can take a line
> level feed through a couple of blocking capacitors without having to buy an
> expensive interface.

It's 48 vdc, positive ground if you want to get really picky, and yes,
that works... though I've always preferred the "extra" treatment the
telephone interface provides courtesy of an undersized transformer<G>

[EggHd]

I have NEVER been able to get anything close to as cool as the effect on Ian
Anderon's vocal filter/whatever in Aqualung.




---------------------------------------
"I know enough to know I don't know enough"

[Papapropagandhi]

Hey what not build a microphone out of a telephone i know there was an article
back awhile ago in tape op about this.
Mike

[Mike Rivers]

In article <3F3CB519.AABA14D6@verizon.net> b.ross@verizon.net writes:

> There are plenty of devices on the market that provide a telco RJ-11 to
> line level audio interface. Just give your singer the ****tiest old
> bakelite phone with a rotary dial & carbon mic you can find, hork that into
> a Gentner or JK Audio telephone hybrid interface, patch that into your
> console and you're off.

How about just having the singer phone in his part from home?


--
I'm really Mike Rivers - (mrivers@d-and-d.com)

[Robert Pascarella]

On 15 Aug 2003 15:31:43 -0400, mrivers@d-and-d.com (Mike Rivers)
wrote:

>
>In article <3F3CB519.AABA14D6@verizon.net> b.ross@verizon.net writes:
>
>> There are plenty of devices on the market that provide a telco RJ-11 to
>> line level audio interface. Just give your singer the ****tiest old
>> bakelite phone with a rotary dial & carbon mic you can find, hork that into
>> a Gentner or JK Audio telephone hybrid interface, patch that into your
>> console and you're off.
>
>How about just having the singer phone in his part from home?


You could use a Getner box. It takes the handset wire in and puts out
line level. There are lot's of devices that will connect to the
headset output and convert it out to line level. Even go the other way
from line in-out through the same phone line.

I use stuff like this when I client wants to monitor a voice over
session via phone.

bp.

[Guitarboy]

In article <20030815130516.28604.00000056@mb-m18.aol.com>, EggHd
<egghd@aol.com> wrote:

> I have NEVER been able to get anything close to as cool as the effect on Ian
> Anderon's vocal filter/whatever in Aqualung.
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> "I know enough to know I don't know enough"
You could sing into one ear piece of a set of headphones. plug it into
a line level input.

[Andrew Leavitt]

....or from jail, as the singer from Bad Brains was alleged to have
done on one of the tracks off of their 2nd record. I forget the tune,
oh wait a Google search reminds me that it was "Sacred Love." Don't
know if it's really from jail, but it works well for the track.

mrivers@d-and-d.com (Mike Rivers) wrote in message news:<znr1060965747k@trad>...
> In article <3F3CB519.AABA14D6@verizon.net> b.ross@verizon.net writes:
>
> > There are plenty of devices on the market that provide a telco RJ-11 to
> > line level audio interface. Just give your singer the ****tiest old
> > bakelite phone with a rotary dial & carbon mic you can find, hork that into
> > a Gentner or JK Audio telephone hybrid interface, patch that into your
> > console and you're off.
>
> How about just having the singer phone in his part from home?

[meriphew]

You could use a Placid Audio Copperphone mic. Instant phone voice.

_____________________
Post indie electronic
Meriphew
http://www.meriphew.com