A handful of classic rock songs use a synthesized voice. Supposedly, Peter Frampton placed something on (or in?) his voicebox (or pharynx?) that somehow changed his spoken/sung words to a synthesized sounding voice. Also, ELO seemed to have a synthesized sound connected to their keyboards.
Maybe the SD can clarify how both of these sounds were accomplished? (I never fully understood how Frampton did this.) Thanks, Jinx
I thought the device Frampton used was a Talk Box that somehow modulated the output of his guitar with the shape of his mouth (there was a tube that went in his mouth).
No, Frampton used a “Talk Box”. It’s very simple. A 1" compression driver is normally mounted at the back of a horn type speaker, like those used for midrange and upper frequencies in movie theaters. An adapter screws onto the driver to connect a piece of 3/4" surgical tubing to convey the sound produced by the driver. The other end of the tube goes into the guitarist’s mouth. The driver is wired to the speaker output of a guitar amp.
The end result it, you have the sound of your guitar amp in your mouth. Generally it gets taped to the guitarist’s vocal microphone. The guitarist plays a note on the guitar, and forms words with his mouth.
ELO was using a vocoder, which takes sound from a microphone and converts it to an electrical signal to drive a synthesizer.
The ELO effect, meanwhile is a vocoder: a synthesizer that takes a vocal input signal and outputs a synthesized version. The kinds used for live performance have a microphone on a gooseneck sticking up out of them.
Oh, and I hear that Frampton eventually lost all of his teeth as a side effect of using the talk box at high volume. Oh, and gaffa’s reference to the vocoder wasn’t there when I posted this!
I’m not an authority, but searching leads me to believe that may be an urban legend. A site with a talk box FAQ mentions in general that there are stories of people who have rattled their fillings loose, but the author doesn’t personally know of anyone who has.
Also, looking this up on Google, there are dental sites, like this one, with the exact same article apparently distributed to each one, showing Frampton with a very healthy set of chompers, The original author of the article (whoever he may be) does not claim to know Frampton or to ever have worked on his teeth, but describes what he could hypothetically do for him and says “he could have had dental veneers or what we are looking at may be genuine teeth.” But still, although I am not a dentist, Frampton’s teeth look quite genuine to me.
Everyone was stepping all over each other to be helpful in this particular thread.
I built one back when I was a sound engineer. Fun toy. Never rattled my teeth out of my head. They just aren’t used at a high enough volume. Generally guitarists who both sing and use a talkbox adjust the volume of the speaker to match the volume of their singing voice, otherwise the sound engineer would have to adjust the level of that vocal channel every time he switched. Most front of house engineers have more than enough other things to keep busy.
Yeah, it’s very possibly not true. I thought I’d read it in an interview with Frampton himself, but he could have been putting the interviewer on.
[Slight hijack] Could a vocoder take a signal from a source other than a microphone? On the Pink Floyd album “Animals”, there is a cool effect on one of the interludes where a synth, probably a PolyMoog or an ARP 2600, is holding long chords which are shaped to sound like a dog barking. I’ve always wondered if someone ran a tape of a dog barking through a vocoder that was processing the synth chords… Does anyone know, or care to hazard a guess?
Absolutely. If I recall correctly, ARP had a vocoder module for the 2500, the big modular system that Peter Townshend used and that was seen in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. It output a control voltage that could be plugged into other modules, so it could provide pitch or envelope or control a filter or pretty much anything. And the input could be any sound, not just vocals.
Most were monophonic, so you’d pretty much have to stick to single notes. Few non-Tuvan singers can sing more than one note at a time.
You could mime using a hair-dryer!
I haven’t found this on Youtube itself, but these two Lovin’ Spoonful tracks from 60s tv shows are neat.
The second song features some altered vocals about 1/2 way through as the singer appears to sing into a hairdryer…
The link itself is from Beyond the Beat Generation. Some fun 60s stuff there!
Yes, that’s pretty much it. The Floyd’s Animals is a great reference for this topic. In addition to the vocoded dogs, Sheep has that sinister vocoded variation on the 23rd Psalm, while Pigs (Three Different Ones) features Dave Gilmour in a frighteningly porcine talk-box guitar solo.
