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you mentioned in a reply that Pitch correction can get the cher effect, but that it would need some extreme settings. Do you know what settings would be best

Thanks rence

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hueseph Wed, 01/30/2008 - 13:57

Acording to that Sound on Sound article and from the mouth of Mark Taylor himself:

"It all began with a Korg VC10, which is a very rare, very groovy-looking analog vocoder from the '70s, with a built-in synth, a little keyboard and a microphone stuck on top"

Great article by the way. Thanks for the link. I hope to never have to apply that information in any way. :)

mark_van_j Wed, 01/30/2008 - 14:45

bent wrote: Autotune, according to most sources, including: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb99/articles/tracks661.htm

Yup that's the article i was talking about! Thanks!

I played around with the vocals and realised that the vocoder effect could work, but not with the Korg -- the results just weren't clear enough. So instead, I used a Digitech Talker... You plug your mic straight into it, and it gives you a vocoder-like effect, but with clarity...

I used a tone from the Nord Rack as a carrier signal and sequenced the notes the Nord was playing from Cubase to follow Cher's vocal melody. That gave the vocals that 'stepped' quality that you can hear prominently throughout the track -- but only when I shifted the the Nord's notes back a bit... I was messing about with the Nord melody sequence in Cubase and shifted all the notes back a fraction with respect to the vocal...I had to experiment with the timing of each of the notes in the Nord melody sequence to get the best effect. You couldn't hear an effect on all the vocals by any means -- and on others it made the words completely impossible to understand!...

In the end, we only used vocoded sections where they had the most striking effect, but didn't make the lyrics unintelligible. To do that, I had to keep the vocoded bits very short. So for example, when Cher sang 'Do you believe in life after love?', I think I only cut the processed vocals into the phrase on just the syllables 'belie-' from 'believe' and 'lo-' from 'love' ... I made sure throughout that the last word of each vocal phrase was unprocessed, because again, I found it sounded too bubbly and hard to understand when it was vocoded...

EDIT: What a bunch of BS... Just saw the big yellow square myself... :shock: