What are some of your favorite voice effects?

Question

I'm collecting all kinds of voice effects to add to my arsenal.

My absolute favorite is Worldizing a voice in a room by playing it back 4X real-time and recording it 4X real-time so when it gets played back at regular time, the reverb sounds 4X bigger. I haven't tried it faster than that but I could only imagine what it would sound like.

I also liked strapping a plastic tupperware cup over the driver of my auratone speaker and re-recording that to simulate a voice going through a space-mask.

What are some interesting and new voice effects you use?

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Answer 1

I've done a lot of manual envelope following for creature voices (i have a tutorial half finished on the manual process but I think I've worked out how to automate it, so will get around to posting it sometime)

A simple example: in Bridge To Terabithia there is a giant talking tree. We recorded the voice with an MKH800 mic with real time pitchshift so the actor heard themselves deeper/bigger (aka the Kong-alizer).... I took the dialogue track, and cut a track of leaf moves and another track of branch creaks/moves roughly in sync with the lines. Then I manually traced the amplitude envelope of the dialogue using the freehand pen tool in a PT volume graph. Once I had it tight I copied the volume graph (in sync) across to the leaf & branch tracks, so when he speaks you get tightly synced tree branch & leaf movement... (Of course I deleted the volume graph off the dialogue track)

Did the same with another film with wet creepy monster creatures, using watermelon squelches....

Like any dialogue processing you have to be very careful of intelligibility....

Answer 2

sigh I'm still an old-school fan of subtle preverb, I gotta say, for that otherworldly feel. I also like sending different frequency ranges of the voice to different effects: Maybe the highs to a phaser and the lows to a tube distortion...nothing heavy, just adding some sizzle, animation, and alien-ness to spice things up.

Answer 3

Ok, i'm stealing that worldising trick. That might make for a pretty cool IR too...

I had an actor say his line as quickly as he could and used paulstretch to bring it back to full length. It sounds a little spacey and synthy.

I haven't done this yet, but i'm planning to worldise some dialogue with a contact mic and try out various surfaces (metal, glass, etc.).

I've had another idea brewing... It involves taking a line and reversing it, then playing it back to an actor and having them replicate it as best they can. Then you flip it back again. I'm pretty sure i've heard this used before though (Twin Peaks?).

Answer 4

I've had some fun utilizing pitch shift. Duplicate the audio onto another track, pitch it up or down a bit (you'll have to experiment a little to get the effect you might want), then shift that pitched audio a few samples in either direction. You can create some cool eerie/ethereal/downright creepy sounds that way.