Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation

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.

Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation

4 thoughts on “Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation

  1. 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.

  2. i find that it’s best to do this with a simple square wave and automating the filter cuttoff slightly up and down after applying some bitt crusher of course, cubase’s bit crusher is the best i have come across.
    allot of dubstep producers are utilizing this sound effect in allot of songs as of lately and the best way to go about it is to use Massive!

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