hardware to get telephone effect

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 6:36 am

Hi Guys,

I recently watched Alice in chains unplugged and noticed Layne Staley using what looked like a small rectangular shaped metal device which he sang into and produced the "telephone/filtered" vocal effect straight from the unit. Its hard to see on the dvd. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Would be really handy, I know how to get this effect after the fact but having this device would allow the talent to work with it in real time getting a better performance for the part I think.

cheers,

Sammyg

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:57 am

Sorry, still of no help to you, but-- if you know how to get it after the fact, why not just let them monitor the signal in near-realtime? 3ms of latency will still give them the realtime feel.

Greg

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 9:09 am

Run it through a hardware eq, no latency. Chop the highs and low's, maybe even slam it with a compressor. Works for me. Check out any Nickelback show and you'll notice two mics (each) for Chad and Ryan, and their effect sounded great. Although I scoped their FOH rig and traveling with about 20 distressors and just about every other high end toy helps a wee bit... ha.

Enjoy!

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 12:47 pm

It was most likely an eq or filter of some sorts.

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 1:56 pm

A friend of mine recently played me her new CD. One of the cuts had this cool funky distorted megaphone like vocal. I asked her what her producer did. She smiled at me at the piano and held up a very small "Fisher-Price" like battery operated megaphone! She pointed it at her microphone and voilà! So try the obvious?

Truly obvious
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 2:36 pm

Of course one can also use/utilize an FFT style software filter to create a brick wall, vertical slope filter at 300 hertz and at 3000 hertz. Everything above and below those frequencies are cut to zero, do not use "spline curves". The standard frequency response for American telephones. For some reason, in Europe, I believe their responses goes to 4000 hertz, but then there TV is better than ours also?

We don't have to worry about NTSC or "never twice same color". NOW WE HAVE ATSC the Advanced Television Standards Committee a.k.a. "All Those Stupid Consumers". But I digress.

If you don't have any of those filters simply take your "Mackie Board", reduce all high frequencies, reduce all low frequencies and create a nice big peak at between 1 and 2kHz. That will get you sounding like a telephone as well.

Please deposit another $.25
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 3:40 pm

the toy megaphone is great

I worked with a heavy, punk, angst type of band
( you know -- the whole world is BLACK sort of thing )
they used a kids toy
it was a glow in the dark ... fluro colour thing
Shocked

so very funny and it did the trick perfectly

telephone effect
don't forget the hint of distortion
as well as the filtering and the compression

Trivia
there was a Neve or Urei unit that was made specificaly for that telephone thing

I think it was probably Neve because the article I read was about the BBC and post production
??
come to think of it
Geoff Tanner said ??? ... something ??
must have been Neve

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 3:58 pm

RemyRAD wrote:

She smiled at me at the piano and held up a very small "Fisher-Price" like battery operated megaphone! She pointed it at her microphone and voilà! So try the obvious?

How's this for obvious...

How 'bout snagging an old phone headset... shove a mic cable in it and guess what???

You've got a telephone to make the telephone sound!?!

Either that or take the "mic" element (I put quotes around the word mic because it's a real stretch and an insult to real microphones) out of said old headset and mount it in another chassis that would be more stage friendly...

X

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 4:59 pm

Kev,
I think that it was Orban ( but maybe UREI) that made a telephone simulator back in the 60s. I know that the UREI Cooper Time Cube could be used as one, too. All it was was a 50-ft. garden hose rolled up into a box with a little speaker at one end and a mic on the other!
Pierre LaFont up in Quebec used to make a dedicated box for that, and still might.

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:16 pm

thanks for the replies guys, it may well be a toy that he was using!
All I know is that is was the right resonant sound from the word go straight from the unit, had a really great tone to it.
Well, im off to the toy store!!! Damn, its Xmas too!! aahhhhh!!!!

Thanks again,

SammyG

Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 1:52 pm

I like the idea of using a Tele "Mic" to get that sound. On an ADR session I was doing one of the engineers was messing with an eq for about an hour trying to get the perfect wrong sound for a small tv with a news guy on it. during lunch I went home and brought my tv/radio in and with an fm transmitter had a small tv radio to use. Sounded horrible in a great way!

Cheers,
-Ryan-

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 3:28 pm

I wanted the same effect and simply yanked an old carbon crystal mic out of a phone handset, wired it into a jack and tweaked the hell out of it.

It gave off a nasty hum, but I notch EQ'ed out of existence and it sounded wonderfully crappy.

It's on the third verse of this tune...

I was going for a "we're so sorry... Uncle Albert" effect, and this was just what I wanted.

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:11 pm

sammyg wrote:

Hi Guys,

I recently watched Alice in chains unplugged and noticed Layne Staley using what looked like a small rectangular shaped metal device which he sang into and produced the "telephone/filtered" vocal effect straight from the unit. Its hard to see on the dvd. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Would be really handy, I know how to get this effect after the fact but having this device would allow the talent to work with it in real time getting a better performance for the part I think.

cheers,

Sammyg

I generally use a Roland effect for the VS called "Phone Vox". Works great. All it does is dump about +12db at 1k, and pull -everything- else down, and brickwall it.

For a hardware version, a radically eq'd Shure Green Bullet harmonica mic sounds pretty darn cool. Throw a little distortion on it if you like, but it smoothes out with more gain and gets pretty hard to discern.

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:22 pm

The Eventide Ultraharmonizer has great Telephone and Megaphone effects

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 8:39 pm

$10 Radio Shack headset recording interface is a good shot.

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