How to make a talkbox sound on a mininova?

[declanman123]

Hey,

I recently bought a talkbox and want to use it with my Novation Mininova, but can't find a good sound that will really sound like I am talking. I have tried playing with the filters on a lot of them but I just can't find a good one where you can clearly hear the words I'm trying to say.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Declan

[BertKoor]

Opening up the filter and select a harmonically rich waveform should help with vowels.

But if consonants are your trouble, I'm not sure what to do. Always problematic...

[Spitfire31]

Do you really mean a real, analog talkbox – or a vocoder?

They're completely different creatures. A real talkbox consists of an analog acoustic driver (as in a loudspeaker) feeding audio through a tube that you put in your mouth, where you shape the formants with your tongue and mouth cavity (opening/closing it and so on), and capture the resulting sound with a close-talk microphone.

That's a talkbox, and you can't produce recognisable 'speech' with it but use it to impart a wah-wah like effect on the original sound.

/Joachim

[declanman123]

Yes, it is a talk box. It’s a rocktron banshee talk box. It is amplified. I am running it through my mininova

I have seen many videos and recordings of people getting VERY clear language out of their talk box. Almost to the point where you can really hear every word they are saying.

I was just wondering if there were any tips you could give someone, when trying to make a good sound for a talk box. (Or just a sound i could find somewhere and download to my mininova...)

[Spitfire31]

I just watched one example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqYDQPN_nXQ.

There's no magic in it – the guy is singing words with the talbox in his mouth, not just modulating the tb audio, and his voice is being picked up directly by the microphone. A question of balancing levels, basically, between the talkbox output and the voice, isn't it?

/Joachim

[declanman123]

My question isn't how to physically use the talkbox. I understand the mechanics and have used it many times.

The fact is some sounds project and distinguish the words you are saying more than others. In the video, he has a good sound here. You can pretty much somewhat clearly hear every word he is saying. However when I do it, you can't hear the words very well at all.

There are settings you can tweak, like the actually shape of the sound which does help a little, but i guess my question was if anyone had any more tips or tricks that could get it sounding like the guy in the video has it.

Following up to that, if anyone has a downloadable sound that works great for talkbox (as i'm just using a premade one on the mininova which is probably why it isn't great), that would be stupendous.

[Spitfire31]

Sure, I understand. But the fact remains that the key to intelligibility is the direct sound of the players voice and pronunciation, isn't it?

Hope someone else can chip in with Mininova sound suggestions…

/Joachim

[declanman123]

It REALLY makes a difference on what sound you are using. I am being as exaggerated as I can and I can BARELY hear the words coming out (of course I mean pronunciation not volume). The sound feels almost thick in my mouth.

[K-Bee]

You really have to over exaggerate your pronunciation to the extreme. I have no talkbox but I use both the Mininova vocoder and the VC1 vocoder card for the Roland V-Synth and that is my experience. Also, you can record your stuff in a slow tempo with and then timestretch it faster to fit the track in question. That does the trick for me but is a rather slow and tedious workaround.

Roger Troutman would know but sadly he's not around to tell us. RIP

[declanman123]

Got it, I see now that it can only get so distinct. Thank you!