FX advice? Fast gate & "choir"

[.jon]

Hi,

It's been a while already, but I had the pleasure to see Patton's Fantomas live. He used a lot of vocal fx, and quite a deal of computer tech in general. (tho I'm not quite sure what he did with the puter as their sound was very full and very composed...supergig) One of these vocal fx was some sort of harmonic generator, that tripledoublequadripled his voice to sound like a sinister choir. What would that have been, or is there an easy way to use some common techniques to same ends? I guess manual doubling would be ok with one voice, but I have one project that is supposed to have a part that sounds like "million souls wailing".

Other fx that I'm still missing is hi-quality gate with all adjustable knees and whatnots, to be used on increasing dynamics on some rythmic audio material that can't be tuned at source anymore. Gate is the tool for this, right?

Free/cheap preferred, but it's christmas coming and I haven't spent on vst in a long time so commercial ones are ok too if they're really special tia,

.jon

[kritikon]

I guess the vocal FX would be a pitchshifter. A fairly cheap way of getting that type of effect is OhmForce Haematohm. It's a frequency shifter, but does a similar thing, and has delays with switchable routing, so you can get a choir effect. It's not too convincing if you use it to extremes, but just a little frequency shift and lots of feedback on the delay can give you a massed choir - I've done it with vocals to very good effect, although for some reason it doesn't sound very convincing with instruments. It's one you need to tweak - none of the presets do that particular effect. And it helps to then pass the result through a more normal delay too.

I can't really think of any other s/w FX that do that type of thing...in h/w my thoughts would veer towards Eventide...not a cheap route though

You could maybe try some kind of comb filter delay thingy - GRM tools used to release a very good comb filter with feedback, and I think ConcreteFX have some kind of combfilter. There's even a midi controlled comb filter included with Cubase that isn't half bad. It would need a fair bit of work to get it to not sound like a load of metallic mush, but it's do-able.


As for gates I'm mostly happy with the one included in Cubase. There's Floorfish from Digitalfishphones (which can be a very smooth gate - frequency conscious too, which is useful). There's the old Db ProComp which could do compression and expansion down to complete gating (I seem to remember it was only mono though?). I'm sure there are other gates around though.

[kritikon]

Hmmm...2nd thoughts on gates - what host are you using? I know Cubase well, but I would assume most of the other main hosts have very similar features though. For straight audio, I mostly use the audio processing - it has a noise gate with adjustable attack, release, hold and threshold. Have you checked you can't do that with your own host? It'd be in the same pile of audio tricks such as normalising, inverting etc.

[.jon]

Thanks, kritikon!

Yes, h/w is most probably too expensive right now, especially as this is just a personal project. I'll look into Hematohm and some pitchshifter freebies if I can figure it out.

I work nowadays only with eXT, so no host fx here- but I indeed do have Floorfish. Blame me poor memory it's the gate I always use with vocals...

[Music Engineer]

One of these vocal fx was some sort of harmonic generator, that tripledoublequadripled his voice to sound like a sinister choir. What would that have been, or is there an easy way to use some common techniques to same ends?

maybe you want to check out my Shifter-Bank freebie. it creates up to 8 pitch-shifted voices from the source signal.

[Lunch Money]

For an automatic gate, I recommend GGate by GVST. For sequenced gate with adjustable attack/decay, I recommend GetaBlitch Jr. by BetabugsAudio. GetaBlitch will also use MIDI velocity to scale the volume of audio passing through. Handy!

Mind you, I'm favorably biased toward both of those freeware devs.

Greg

[.jon]

Thanks, braindoc, your freebie is just the sort of thing I've been looking for. I'll let you know how it works, now I only tried it on synths. It's a keeper in any case, beautiful sounds from pads

Great, Lunch! I regularly look into the Bugpack, quite diggin Flofi & Chorrosive, and Monstachorus is a classic. I've missed Getablitch somehow, need to try it now! Floorfish did the gate trick, but this GVST stuff is fine.