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Hi all,
I have been creating vocal sound design for sound designers and composers and would greatly appreciate some input, a how to. I'd like to know how to create a :15 "rise" out of my vocals and what other elements would go along with them in order to make the sonics huge and powerful.
Thanks so much Kathie-:)
I have done a lot of vocal recording/mixing as well as sound design and I'd love to help but could you please give a bit more detail on the context?
Choices of tonalities, timbres, sounds, etc. for me depends a lot on context and what you're trying to communicate with the story.
So if you go into a bit more detail about what it will be used for or what the trailer is about or even a vague outline or genre like "Horror", "Suspense", "Family Comedy", I think I could be of more assistance.
Check out the third example in the construction kit example
Hi and thank you, too! I love the horror genre and horror sound design in general, maybe I can help, here are some suggestions :
You want to record vocal rises at different speed and layer them, these will create random clusters and harmonic dissonances.
Also do vocal rises that end in nasty screams.
As additional material I would suggest screams without rises just like girls scream in horror films, more like impacts. Of course any noise you can make, may serve as basis (hiss, grunt, growl etc.)
When layering your voice you will run into harmonic problems, because the typical frequencies of your voice will be doubled over and over again and saturated. So vary the space (reverb setting), pitch them down and up, change speed artificially afterwards. I have done this with violin rises I have recorded myself with my violin, worked pretty good!
If you want to get more into technical rises, you have to create very short loops of your voice (or not so short depending on how it sounds) and create a larger pitch envelope upwards. It sounds easily synthetic, so be careful, in horror sound design, we usually want it to sound "organic". Again layering different rises may be interesting.
To do this you can also try other material, in example a hiss. A hiss naturally can't go up, but with this technique it can. Try to keep the natural sound of the hiss.
One last trick I use sometimes is to "sweep" through the spectrum with a filter. The frequencies "high lighted" get higher and higher. Of course you need a rich source sound for this (scream?). Here also it can sound quickly artificial so be careful, to not go too fast.
Hope this helps!
As an additional advice: take Paul Stretch, process some painful or frightened screams with it. You'll get a handful of nice, slowly rising non-realistic vocal beds. Use them wisely.
Are you asking what raw vocals to record, or are you asking, how to design your vocals, once recorded?
Btw. lovely sound design on your page!
Something you may have already tried but doesn't seem to have come up yet - reverse the vocal sample, bounce it with reverb on and then reverse the resulting audio back again to get that classic haunting vocal sound. The longer the decay on the reverb you use in this process, the longer the rise into the actual spoken phrase will be.
You could also try putting a fairly strong reverb on the vocal sample and then running it through a white noise vocoder setting to get a sort of breathy feel to it. Guess that one could be a bit hit and miss though.
Re the Dark Knight continually ascending sine wave thing, I don't know what technique they used but it sounds a lot like a Shepards Scale to me - see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
Also I second Paul Stretch :)
Cheers!
You can alternate vocal screams between reversed and normal a the same time logarithmically change pitch and time duration.
