One thing I haven’t talked about yet is vocals. The main reason for this is that I am a terrible singer and need to work with other people to get an opportunity to try and perfect my craft in this department.
My vocals will remain dreadful regardless of what magic is employed. You could use every trick in the book and I’m still going to make Lemmy sound like Susan Boyle, so how was I going to get round the problem of me having recorded a vocal track for one of my songs (by mistake, as Withnail would say)?
Well it seemed to me that the best option was to disguise the fact that it was a voice at all. I thought about using the Vocoder but either because it makes me think of ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO, or because it is fiendishly tricky to set up, involving the use of a separate audio track and MIDI track, I settled for a more straightforward, ‘throw everything at it’ approach.
Sorry, I should have marked that as NSFW! But you get the idea, it’s really quite bad.
Now add this to it
Savage EQ, Compression, Chorus, Reverb, Exciter, Melodyne and a Noise Gate, and it still sounds terrible but doesn’t sound like it’s trying to sound good.
Now add another channel with a different set of effects, including distortion and ridiculous quanities of reverb and compression.
Now add a third track, with the same effects as the first and pan them both out wide, mix them all together and you get something which if not voals, serves approximately the same purpose.
Here’s a mix of the track
I don’t think I’ll be winning any prizes for my vocal prowess, but I think the effect is tolerable at least.
Phil Wakely Audio 