External equipment

[skitzodancer]

Hellos guys,

All my productions have had no vocals and just music. I my latest project I do want to add some vocals but I'm going to vocoder the crap out of them so they sound similar to the boys noize talk box vocals.

What do you guys think, should I spend £150 on a mic or should I spend the £150 on a talk box?

I know I will end up with the same effect, I just thought one of you guys may have som e insight you could share with me

Thanks guys

 

[gannonsamuel]

Are you going to use either of these things again?

go for the thing you think you'll get the most use out of...

if neither are going to get much use after this project, i would assume that you can get a better talkbox for £150 than mic. but that is me assuming that good talkboxes are generally cheaper then good mics.

do you already have a mic that is useable?

 

[spoonie1972]

i'm going to get flamed for this - but -

if you're using a laptop, have you tried the built-in mic? if all you're doing is effecting it to high-heaven w/ a vocoder (logic 9's built in one is pretty darn good) maybe it'll do?

 

[genshi]

i'm going to get flamed for this - but -

if you're using a laptop, have you tried the built-in mic? if all you're doing is effecting it to high-heaven w/ a vocoder (logic 9's built in one is pretty darn good) maybe it'll do?

I would say this is the best solution. For vocoding (something I've been doing since the late 1970s) the quality of the mic doesn't really matter, it's the quality of the vocoder. I have used Ableton Live which has an ok vocoder (which I used with the Macbook Pro's built-in mic.) Native Instruments had a better software vocoder, and I heard Logic has a really good one as spoonie1772 mentioned, but my current vocoder is a hardware vocoder; the Electrix Pro Warp Factory which is actually one of the best and simplest vocoders I have ever used (though my vintage Electro-Harmonix EH-0300 Vocoder in the 70s sounded better.) The only thing with hardware vocoders is, you will need a synth or something as the Source/Carrier signal and then your voice as the Formant/Modulator signal.

A "Talk Box" though is a different beast (unless there is some new product calling itself a talk box.) Traditionally, a Talk Box, something that Peter Frampton was famous for back in the 1970s, is actually a box with a tube that goes into your mouth, then whatever you play through your guitar or synth amp comes out your mouth and by forming shapes with your mouth you affect the sound going back into the mic. The problem with this is, you usually have to have a guitar/keyboard amp, two mics and a tube in your mouth... and in that case, mic quality does matter!

I know Electro-Harmonix has some new "voice box" effects, but I don't know how well they work... but they are more modern and would probably be what you are looking for, for that modern, vocal processing sound.