Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation
January 28, 2010 – 1:26 pm by John Keston
While reviewing my set for last night’s Ostraka performance, I noticed that using filtering followed by down-sampling produced a robotic vowel like sound applied to synth bass. It’s got a nice vintage vocoder or Speak & Spell graininess to it.
Finding this effect was really an accident, because I had been using this particular effect chain on my master track in this set for a while, but hadn’t stumbled across the settings that produced this sound until last night. Placing the filter before doing the the down-sampling is the key. It does not work the other way around.
Here’s a couple of minutes to illustrate how to apply the effect. I was making real-time adjustments to the frequency of the low pass filter, and the amount of down-sampling. Toward the end I upped the reverb to give it some tail.
3 Responses to “Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation”
sounds great! are you willing to part with the effect chain? is this in Logic?
By Tim on Jan 29, 2010
thanks! glad you like. to reproduce the effect, in ableton put an autofilter with a lowpass filter followed by bit reduction onto the track. crank up the Q, then modulate (or adjust manually) the frequency on the filter while turning up the down-sampling.
By John Keston on Jan 29, 2010
very cool effect !
By D.Ferri on Feb 12, 2010