I need to create six different voices for an animation I am working on. all six characters are androids or cyborgs, two female,four male. The voices do not have to sound 100% natural which gives me some latitude. I can't say I have been very impressed by the likes of MorphVox. I wonder if I might be better off getting a half decent pitch shifter/formant shifter and use that along with a filter or two.

Anyone got any thoughts suggestions? I'm open to any ideas.

regards Bishka

Bitspeak and any vocoder. The TAL vocoder is pretty good and is free, but my fave is IL Vocodex.

You might want to try SFX Machine Pro, currently the audio-midi no brainer for $20. Lots of pitch shifting options there, although i can't remember off-hand if it shifts formants too, but it's generally a wealth of high quality creative effects.

Thanks to you both for your replies.
So far, I have looked into the SFX Machine, played with the demo but there is no formant shifting, I have put it on my short list all the same .
The thing with vocoders is that there are somany its hard to know where to start! So thanks for the heads-up. I will be getting Quick Quack's Pitchwheel as part of the solution (will be usefull for other things as well).

This Character Voice Millarky is proving more complex that I first thought, its not just changing the timber/pitch its also about changing the way you speek LOL.

Regards Bishka

yup, its basically 'acting'.

unfortunately, your timing is kind of unlucky; a short while ago there were a couple of plugins going very cheap which might have been useful, but they're back at their original price, ie Antares Mutator and Antares Throat, both of which could have been picked up for about £35 altogether. Flux Trax was significantly reduced for a while too, although even its on-sale price was kinda pricy.

A formant-shifting phase vocoder might be useful as well. An article athttp://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr07/articles/pcmusician_ 0407.htm ] sound on sound[/url] suggests that Waves Morphoder can do that and its currently $75 from what I can see.

Meldaproductions MVocoder is available at a ridicoulus introductory price of 10 Euro or 12 USD (1/3 off full price). It has some formant shifting options (haven't played much with them yet though) and sounds great. No internal oscillator, so you need to place it on the track/bus of your carrier and feed it your modulator via sidechain or something similar depending upon the routing of your prefered host. This can be reversed, there's a "Swap carrier and modulator" option. Up to 8 tracks (surround), many others only do mono processing. Plenty of modulation options, but still easy to get started with the basics and learn the rest as you go along. Perhaps tweaking and/or modulating resonance settings can help getting even more "unreal" effects.

Audio Damage Discord 3 may also be of some use, experiment with crossfeedback between the two pitchshifters and varios modulation settings - if you've got some way of making it less stereo that may be of use at it has one pitchchifter per channel.

Combining these plugins may give interesting results, if you don't find Discord 3 to "oldschool". Also you may want to have a look at some of the other plugins from Meldaproduction, the pitchshifters have options you'll possibly find useful but I don't have much experience with them.

Native Instruments "The Mouth" is pretty good IMO. Check the YouTube video of the demo song...

Sorry it has taken me this long to reply.
Thanks to every one who has replied, there has been some very intersting sugestions that have taken up some of my time along with actualy working on my animation.

The Throat looks to be the most intersting and I have found it for £53 ($79) at http://www.vintageking.com/Antares-THROAT-Evo but I would need to get an Ilok as well which bumps the price up (and I haven't finished paying for my new computer yet...or the repears to my other one LOL).

Anyway I will be looking at all the sugestions, as once again, thank to everyone.

Regards Bishka

H Bishka;

Just so you know audiomidi seem to still have The Throat and Mutator at $29 (£20) each.

http://www.audiomidi.com/Throat-Evo-Serial-Number-Only/dp/B0 07X09JVQ
http://www.audiomidi.com/Mutator-Native-Serial-Number-Only/d p/B007X09JCK

Don't forget ring modulators. Always good for a weird robot voice.

Also, delays with a very short delay time.

I heard some good examples in warmverbs demo.


http://tone2.com/html/warmverb_vst_au_effect_synthes.html

Give it a listen, it might have something.

That's why I recommended Discord 3, you can use short delays, modulate and filter them if you will (offcourse the filters can also be modulated, but you depend upon the same LFO for the filter as for the delay time) and have pitchshifting thrown into the feedback loop as well. x 2 with crossfeedback! No demo though, only a full return if you're not happy with it...

There's also the Valhalla DSP FreqEcho which combines delay and frequency shifting (pretty similar to ringmodulation, basically half a ringmodulator), and it's free! As you need six different voices with different characters perhaps that's worth looking into as well (sorry for throwing in yet another option, but as it's free and surprisingly flexible when tweaked a bit you may want too consider it). There's a MkII just around the corner, there are some slight issues with automation in MkI that wil be fixed but other than that it's perfectly usable with no other glitches that I'm aware of.

Also, the before mentioned MVococoder includes a ringmodulation mode - worth considering for flexibility, especially when you're an a rather thight budget...

My favourites are Bitspeek and an old AKAI vocoder plugin that they discontinued. AVOX Throat can be cool to throw into the mix to change formant qualities.
The Waves bundles have some cool things in too, I read in an interview that Matthew Wood of Skywalker Sound fame got the General Grievous sound with some waves plugs.

Creator of Knobman offer free "autotune" like VST. It has formant change.

http://www.g200kg.com/en/software/kerovee.html

Stock Pitchcorrect in Cubase does it well.

Melodyne does it too but it costs.

Haven't tried it but have read someweher that Reaper also might have something similar.

Thanks again to all that replied.
I now have a short list of plugind to get.
I have just got Throat. Though for some reason the plugin is telling me that it is on a 10day trial even though I have got my Ilok and reg number and jumped through all the hoops to regester/authorize it, I expect I have done something wrong or missed something out somewhere along the line.

I also got MVocoder last week.

I'll get WarmVerb sometime over the next month.

So many plugins.....so little time LOL.

Regards Bishka