Make your voice or music sound crazy with these special effects that you can apply post-process (after recording) or in real-time with a mixer.
Happy April Fool's Day!
Rob Robideau, from the Personal Armament Podcast and a clients for my Subscribe & Follow widget, placed the idea for this April Fool's Day topic in my mind back in August.
I was wondering if you can recommend a piece of hardware or software to warp voices. I would like to do some comedy “pretend interviews” for my podcast and I have no idea where to start. …
I'm not really looking to impersonate a specific voice. I want to do some satire. An interview with a pro-wrestler about self-defense. An overzealous gun shop salesman. Something that makes my voice still sound human, just not like my voice. It doesn't have to be perfect, people will know it's humor. I just recently purchased a Behringer 2442FX if that helps with anything.
Special effects in Audacity
Included under the Effects menu
- Phaser
- Wah Wah
- Reverse
- Change speed
- Change pitch
- Change tempo
- Sliding Time Scale/Pitch Shift
Extra plugins and program
- After you install an extra plugins, you can use it in Audacity. Try Turntable Warping MS
- Extra program PaulStretch for Windows or binary for OS X for this effect:
Real-time effects with a mixer
I demonstrate 16 different effects that my Behringer Xenyx X1832USB ($305.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend, Music123) has built-in
- Reverb: Hall, Room, Plate, Gated, Reverse
- Ambience/Delay: Early Reflections, Ambience, Delay, Echo
- Modulation: Chorus, Flanger, Phaser
- Detune/Pitch: Detune, Pitch shifter
- Combination effects: Delay + reverb, Chorus + reverb
Here are a variety of smaller mixers with similar effects processing.
- Behringer Xenyx 1002FX—$89.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend, Music123
- Behringer Xenyx 1202FX—$108.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
- Behringer Xenyx X1204USB (like my previous four-channel mixer)—$167.99 Amazon.com, $196.99 Musician's Friend
- Alesis MultiMix 8 USB FX—$141.55 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
- Mackie PROFX8—$229.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
- Almost any mixer with “FX” in the name, or higher-end Behringer mixers beginning with “X” in the model number (like my X1832USB)
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Thanks… been looking forward to you posting this episode. Still enjoying your "secret sauce." ;>)
You're welcome, Bruce! I need to update my sauce to the latest version, but just haven't remember to try it. :/
You're welcome! It's always fun to be a kid again with Audacity. 🙂
Never mind the irritation factor of "Friday"–do you have permission to play it? See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_… for help keeping out of trouble on this score.
Also, unless you have evidence that your listeners are all in their 20s, you might re-think the jokes about great-grandparents and history museums. Statistics (and attending any conference) show that most podcasters and hard-core social media types are middle aged. We remember cassette tapes and turntables perfectly well, though I for one don't miss them.
Hi, Sallie!
The "fair use" clause of copyright law and the digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) allow me to play up to thirty seconds of copyrighted material as long as I comment on it, especially for educational purposes.
hey so when you do the chipmunk / devil voice, the listener can still hear your original voice tone overlapping with slight delay even. is there an easy way to cut that out so that the effect is the one recorded / heard not the original voice too? Does this effect get applied to all the mic channels? like if I wanted to only do it to my voice not the cohost’s… Thanks so much for this!
What you have to do on most mixers is mute the original channel so it doesn’t come through while the FX are processed and sent back through.