Recording Tips and Techniques

The Doctor Who Dalek Voice

November 22, 2013 by Ken 14 Comments

[This was originally posted during the week of Dr. Who celebrations around the 50th anniversary in 2013]. History celebrated the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and BBC America filled the week with all kinds of specials, premieres, a biopic, and marathons, to culminate in The Day of The Doctor special (the geek in me was all “a-squee” this week:)).
So what does this have to do with audio? Well if you’re a fan of Doctor Who, you’re probably aware of its most famous villain – the Daleks. These biological alien mutants living inside a tank-like mechanical shell. And they have a very distinctive voice, usually shouting “exterminate! exterminate!” Yeah, they have anger issues. But I digress. What about the audio? It’s that Dalek voice. How do they make it sound like that?
The actor who does the voice of the Daleks (they all sound pretty much the same) – currently Nicholas Briggs – speaks into a microphone hooked up to something called a “ring modulator.” Specifically, he uses a Moog Moogerfooger MF-102 Ring Modulator. They don’t simply process a voice-actor’s audio after-the-fact. Nicholas Briggs is actually on the set and in rehearsals with his audio rig so the other actors can actually hear the real Dalek voice while filming scenes. But what is a ring modulator?

Ring Modulator

A ring modulator is basically a box that mangles audio. Of course, there are plenty of ring modulator software programs – usually in the form of plugins for recording software – that can provide the same effect. If you really want to get into the reasons why it is called a “ring modulator,” and you geek out when you hear the terms “diode circuit” or “bridge rectifier,” you can read all about that here.
But the basics beyond “box that mangles audio” can be explained fairly clearly – in keeping with our mission to present needlessly or overly complex material so anyone can get it. A ring modulator combines two sounds in order to create that mangled audio I mentioned. So let’s start with a single sound, one audio signal. It could be anything – a voice, a drum, a pure tone sine wave, etc.
For the sake of keeping the explanation simple, lets say our sound (the first of the two) is a pure sine wave at a frequency of 440 Hz. That would be an A note, musically – that’s where the term “A440” comes from. If you “modulate” the frequency (which just means to change the frequency) to 880 Hz, you’d get an A note that is the next octave up (if you double the frequency of a note, you get that same note an octave higher). This effect doesn’t simply change octaves like that – there are a more complex things happening with the frequencies. But it’s sort of based on the same idea.
So a ring modulator combines the frequencies of two audio signals together and plays the result. But it also subtracts one frequency from the other. Then it outputs the blended result of both. Wacky, right?
In case you want a bit more information about all he stuff under the hood of ring modulation, check out the wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_modulation.
The point is that ring modulation is the effect used to create the Dalek voice. Of course you can turn the knobs to change all sorts of parameters on the effect controls, like the frequencies and shape of the audio wave form for extra gnarly sound. But what you probably just want to know is how to make yourself sound like a Dalek, don’t you? Admit it. Yes you do.

How To Make Yourself Sound Like a Dalek

Mooger-Fooger-Ring-Modulator</a> — Moogerfooger Ring-Modulator

You COULD do it like Nicholas Briggs, and walk around talking into a microphone and carrying your Moogerfooger, microphone, and speaker with you. It would be fun to walk into a restaurant and order your food like a Dalek. Tell them to bring it quickly or they will be exterminated;). But though hilarious, that could be difficult and a bit pricey. The Moogerfooger goes for $289.
Here is how you do it much more affordably (or free, if you already have Reaper recording software).
Open a track in Reaper. Then click the “FX” button on the track control panel and find the effect called: “JS: Liteon/ringmodulator.” It comes with Reaper!

Next, you will want to make one adjustment to the ring modulator. The first slider is called Mod Frequency (scale). Slide that to the left until it’s at about 5.58. See picture on the left. What you’re going for here is a modulation frequency of 30 Hz. The slider changes that number, which you can see in the black box at the bottom of the plugin (again, see the pic on the left).
Once that’s all set, you can close the FX window and record your voice.
Normally, I would STRONGLY advise against clipping your audio – which is what happens when your voice is too loud for the interface. You get distorted audio. But in this case, that’s what we want! In the picture, you can see (above the plugin window) my voice is all squared off on the top and bottom. That means it’s been clipped. So turn up your interface/input gain, and get your mouth right up against the grill of the microphone. Dynamic mics (like the Shure SM58) work best for this since they are rugged stage mics and are used to being dropped, kicked and screamed into. If you use a condenser mic, be careful not to damage it. They are quite sensitive.
Anyway, get your mouth up to the mic and record yourself reciting some classic Dalek lines, ending of course with the word “EXTER…MI…NATE!” Try to sound as much like a Dalek as you can, with the halting robotic rhythm and the tone rising at the end of each line. Of course you’ll also have to do it in an English accent, since everyone knows that Daleks are all English – specifically they seem to be from the London area by the sound of it;). When you play it back, you will sound like a Dalek.
Below is what it sounded like when I attempted to do all of this. No laughing – this is serious business:).

Good luck, and I hope you enjoyed the 50th Anniversary festivities!

Use Ducking For Electronic Dance Music Effect

September 22, 2013 by Ken 2 Comments

I originally wrote this article in September of last year – before I saw the movie, “Now You See Me.” I’m updating it because we just watched that excellent movie, and the effect I describe below for using ducking in electronic music can be clearly heard in the soundtrack at the end of the movie, during the credits. On the soundtrack album, the song is track number 8, “Now You See Me – Robert DeLong Remix.” It’s an electronic variation of the “Now You See Me” theme composed by Brian Tyler. Take a listen at the iTunes store here.
Ducking in audio recording is a really useful effect for any number of things. The basic idea is that when the audio on one track (you need multi-track recording software for this) gets louder, the audio on another track (or even all the other tracks) get less loud. It’s like one track pushes the other track(s) down and out of the way. Or put another way – the other track(s) “duck” out of the way of of the controlling track.
I wrote about how to do this using Reaper multi-track software in my article What is Ducking In Audio Recording? The object is most commonly to allow a single voice to be clearly heard over some background music. So whenever the audio on the vocal track is sounding, the volume on the music track gets correspondingly less loud. When listening to JUST the music track in that case, it sounds a bit weird. But when combined with the vocal track, you don’t even notice that the music is getting softer at those points because the voice fills in the void.
The way that one track controls another is by use of something called “side-chaining,” which just means that you send some of the output of one track to another track. In ducking, you put a compressor effect on the track that you want to do the ducking – the music track in the above example. But instead of the music controlling the action of the compressor, you bring in the audio from a different track (the vocal track in our example) to feed/control the compressor on the track doing the ducking.
But remember that I said ducking can be used for a lot of different effects? And remember when I said that listening to JUST the track doing the ducking can sound weird, since it is inexplicably lowering and raising its volume at seemingly random times? Well we can use THAT in Electronic Dance Music (EDM).
The idea is to set up a music track with a pad (synthesizer playing a long, sustained sound – a note or chord), and then to cause the the volume of that music to drop almost completely out periodically – typically to the rhythm of the song. So you set up a drum track to be the controlling track, and whenever a drum hit happens, the volume of the music track drops, gving out a sort of pulsing, throbbing sound perfect for EDM. Then just mute the drum track, and you have a very rhythmic and dance-to-able synth pad track.
The following article shows you how to do the EDM ducking thing using Cakewalk’s Sonar X2 Producer software. Of course you can do the same thing in Reaper using the same technique I described in the article linked at the top of the page.
Red that article here: http://blog.cakewalk.com/edm-ducking-synth-melodies/

Using Compression To Punch Up The Kick and Snare Drums

September 15, 2013 by Ken Leave a Comment

Compression is an effect often used to add punch and power to kick and snare drums, especially in pop and rock music. Adding compression to the drums in your recordings is a simple matter nowadays (yes, I’m still all geeky about how much easier it is to do recording now that everything is software – even 15+ years since I was able to make the transition from analog tape).
Anyway, the process of adding the compressor effect (now usually a plugin on the tracks in your software) is the same with pretty much all recording software. Below is an article showing you how to do it using Cakewalk’s SONAR X2 Producer software. I did a video showing you how to add compression in Reaper using the built-in compressor plug-in, “ReaComp” in my post, Vocal Compression Using Reaper’s ReaComp Effect Plugin.
Read the article on drum percussion in Sonar here: http://blog.cakewalk.com/make-kick-and-snare-sound-more-aggressive/

Mixing With Headphones

August 21, 2013 by Ken Leave a Comment

When doing multi-track music recording, you obviously must mix all the instruments and voices together at the end so that everything is heard and plays well together. The challenge in mixing is to make sure many different sounds are audible in the right context and in the correct space – both left-to-right as well as front-to-back. One common rule-of-thumb is “never mix with headphones.” More specifically, it means you should not mix with ONLY headphones. You get a much more accurate picture (odd word to use for audio, right?) of what’s going on if you can hear the mix through loudspeakers (monitors), so the sound is coming through the air before it hits your ears.
However, if your space – typically a converted bedroom when we are talking about home recording studios – is less than ideal, mixing with loudspeakers creates its own problems. Reflections off the walls, ceiling, floor, etc. bounce around and create inaccuracies in what you ultimately hear (constructive and destructive wave interference are the culprits, in case you remember your wave mechanics from school;)). So there are times when it is advisable to do your mixing with both headphones and with loudspeakers.
Björgvin Benediktsson has some tips for this in his post over at Audio Issues. Check them out here: http://www.audio-issues.com/music-mixing/mixing-with-headphones-use-this-one-trick-for-better-translation/#axzz2ceYlFcI2

Auxiliary Sends For Effects

August 10, 2013 by Ken Leave a Comment

I wrote about this topic once before in the post – Using Auxiliary Sends For Effects In Pro Tools. That article references a video from Wink Sound showing you how to use auxiliary sends in Pro Tools to process effects on a bass guitar track – as opposed to simply adding (instantiating is the word usually used here, meaning creating an “instance” of an effect) each effect directly onto the bass track.
Well, I wanted to add some things to what I said in that article. First, I stated that the main reason for using an auxiliary send was to save processing power on your computer. Though this is still a major benefit if you have multiple tracks all dipping their buckets (my metaphor) into the same effects (say, reverb) trough (a metaphor for the auxiliary track with the effect on it). However, that is not the only benefit of using an auxiliary send/track for processing some effects.
As shown in the example in the video, the main benefit is the extra control you have by processing the effect independently of the dry (meaning with no effects) audio from the bass track. In the video, Mike creates a new track – the auxiliary track – and puts a chorus effect on it. Then he uses something called a “send,” on the bass track, which basically just taps/siphons/splits off the audio signal so you can send it somewhere else, while the main bass audio continues to the master output as normal. The “send” is routed to the auxiliary track to be treated by the chorus effect.
So far, there isn’t much of an advantage to doing this as opposed to just sticking (instantiating) the chorus effect on the bass track, other than from an organization standpoint where you have both a dry and a wet signal to work with. But then Mike talks about adding an EQ to the aux track (which already has a chorus effect on it) in order to filter the chorus so that the chorus only happens in a certain frequency range. You wouldn’t be able to do that if you just slapped both the EQ and the chorus effects onto the bass track.
So to sum up ((ha! a little send/bus/aux pun for you:)), using a “send” from an audio track to process effects has multiple advantages. It allows you to create a common effect track that you can send multiple tracks in order to share the same effect (BTW, you use a “bus,” as explained in the video, to accept multiple track sends for summing. Tracks, like an auxiliary track, cannot usually accept inputs from more than one source. So you set that single source as the bus). And it also allows you the flexibility to process effects differently than you could if they were all just plugged into (instantiated) the audio track.
Below is that video I keep talking about. It uses Pro Tools, but the steps are the same in any digital audio workstation (DAW). However, things can get more flexible, and consequently more complex, in computer mixers like you have in DAWs. For example, in Reaper, tracks can also act as busses! That means tracks CAN accept multiple sends from other tracks. So you can set up a track as an effects bus, putting the effects on that track and sort of combining the aux and bus into one. So you wouldn’t have to route the send from and audio track first to a bus, and then to the aux track. Yeah, I know. That’s a bit confusing, even to me, to read it. I’ll write an article just on sends busses and auxiliary tracks to help it make sense.
Anyway, here is the video. I promise this time:).

Cheers!