Reproducing "telephone" voice

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 12:18 pm

hey guys, whats up? I wanted to know how to recreate 2 things: a "telephone" voice and a "movie-trailer-voice"....what are the predominant effects? Thanks.

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 12:34 pm

While there are may ways to get the phone voice effects, I often just just use the preset on one of my Eventide's.

The trailer voice is all about the source of the voice and very little effects or processing is going to make up for not having the right source voice.

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 12:57 pm

Ok, I know...but say you have the source voice, how do you make it sound deep like a radio announcer? Overcompress it?

and also, what are the ways to get to the 'telephone' voice, without using a preset?

thanks

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:28 pm

No shortcuts. In the real world, the end result of a deep voice like a radio announcer is by having the voice of a radio annoucener as the source. If you don't have that voice, then you don't have that voice. You can't create what is not there to begin with. While you can process anyting to be more like you want something to be, no amount of compression, effects or tubes is going to make you sound like a radio voice other than a genuine voice that already has the specialized voice characteristics of a really good voice over talent or radio jock.

As far as the telephone effect, you can cheat and find it if you search for it. I won't spoil your chance at learning real engineering skills so I would suggeset you do real work. Use Eq and listen. Ok, here is a clue: What is it about the phone freq response that is different from the full freq reponse you hear from most headphone or speakers? Think about that and then try to duplicate what you hear. DON'Y BE LAZY!

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 10:06 pm

as already alluded to telephone voice is about band limiting...
as an experiment... i wonder what a sub bass harmonizer would do for your trailer effect???

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 10:27 pm

Quote:

wonder what a sub bass harmonizer would do for your trailer effect???

Ruin it!!!

Even Don LaFontaine gets an 80Hz HPF.
Voice overs DO NOT go to the LFE/Sub

Its the voice............

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 10:36 pm

mercurix wrote:

Ok, I know...but say you have the source voice, how do you make it sound deep like a radio announcer? Overcompress it?

You previously asked about a "movie trailer voice" now you ask about a
"Radio announcer" they are 2 different animals.

I cant comment on radio announcer compression, but movie trailer voices barely need any compression. Thats why they cast them for the trailers.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:24 am

I thought that I might pipe in here about the whole concept of the radio voice.. I have worked with a few guys and gals who were born with really cool voices, one guy just had a velvity deep sound that pair with the Neuman U47 (I think that was the one we were using at the time) sounded like freaking butter! He was hired at a local station and after about a year, let go. Why? Probably because in radio, your voice will only get you so far. 2 things that are strongly emphasized at this time in radio are, performance and just sounding natural, genuine and like the listener's buddy. Get those things and you can really nail the whole radio voice thing. Don't get me wrong, some things require a guy who sounds like hes 8' tall but not everything does either but quite often, that guy doesn't sound very believable.
My approach is to voice ads tring to sound like your best friend. No fancy audio engineering just getting it into the mic the right way first.

Some ideas,
Pitch shift a voice down 1 semitone but any more than that (especially if you're using audio-suite pitch shift in Protools) and it can start to sound off.

Trying doubling up a vocal onto 2 mono tracks, pan one hard left, one hard right then delay one by a few milliseconds, the more, the crazier sounding.

Make 2 dialogue tracks again and just pitch shift one up or down a few cents (I find 3 works well) and play them together for a little effect.

If you have access to the Wave's doubler plug, try sitting that on your voice, have a go at playing with the delays and eq, I often get good results with that one.

Play with a high-pass filter as an insert, that alone can create all kinds of different results... Telephone like sounding voice included

Regards.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 7:31 am

One of the characteristics of the sounds you get from talking over the telephone is the quality, along side the frequency range. Of course there is very little bass-response over a phone line, but one trick to get the telephone sound is to take the sample of the voice you want to change, and lower the sample rate. If you were to open even sound recorder in Windows, and record something at 22.2khz or 44.4khz, and then change the sample rate of the recorded track down to a much lower setting, say, 8,000 hz, at 16-bit, it sounds distorted and crackly, much like a voice over a telephone.

Here's an example I did using Sound Recorder pretty quick, by using the File -> Properties menu to lower the sample rate:

codestash.net/high.wav
codestash.net/low.wav

It took about 3 minutes, using a sample from a South Park episode I was watching at the time, so I didn't make a grand effort to make it perfect... well - close to telephone audio quality.

This is a pretty bad hack for getting such an effect, but you need to experiment and try different things to get what you are looking for... no two people will always do the same thing!

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 8:17 am

Quote:

I wanted to know how to recreate 2 things: a "telephone" voice

The term to tweak a voice coming through a small speaker is called futzing.

A trick that was implemented before digital recording was to play the audio back through the speaker in question, mic the speaker and record it.
Ala Walter Murch, (look up American Grafitti articles)
I still do this today. You cant beat this method with any plugin.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:49 am

I know this is a redundant post, but that makes perfect sense, and is also pretty much recreating the telephone sound in the exact way the telephone does (the telephone uses a low-quality little speaker - use a low-quality little speaker!)... I think I was overthinking this.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 10:49 am

Yeah - I was just going to add my two bits ... in line with the last two posts, if I wanted a telephone sound, the first thing I'd try would be a telephone.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:02 am

also the phone freq is 2KHz...it has a bandwidth of 4KHz...simple eqing will do it for u...

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:47 pm

Now we're really beating a dead horse here with the whole "telephone voice" thingy!! I have a general question of opinion.. If you're going to broadcast someone who's supposed to sound like they're on the phone, would recording their voice physically coming out of a small speaker or phone create a dirtier signal? And, if it does, would one want to simplify the process and EQ, just to keep it cleaner overall? Most of the time, when I do that effect, it's only for seconds anyway.

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 2:42 pm

I've used a pair of Horrortones driven by an old Philips amp that's driven by an old Ashley SC66 parametric. Then I mic it all up with an E-V 666...Thin and dirty...like I like my women!
BTW, when was the last time "one" used a phone that was "clean"?

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