Over-speaker voice effect - help please

A

Azirithdorr

New member
Hi there everyone!

I'm trying to recreate the voice effect of hearing someone speak over a speaker - such as you hear when a pilot is talking to ground control, or a stormtrooper is speaking, or you would hear over a walkie-talkie in the movies.

Does anyone know the technical name for this type of effect and/or how to create it? Any suggested software for this purpose? Finally, does the static noise before and after speaking over such devices have a name ?

Thanks alot for any advice on this!
 
Its usually a combination of a number of effects processors, including (but not limited to):

bandpass filters and EQ (drop the lows and the highs)
ring modulator (for that Dalek-y sound)
distortion (guitar cabinet simulators can be handy for this)
resonant filter
telephone simulator
dynamic compression (to limit the bandwidth)
Phaser
Flanger
Vocoder

If you can get your hands on the type of equipment you're trying to simulate, you might want to try actually recording the dialogue through the equipment in question (always record a "clean" version onto a seperate track). Ham radios, walkie-talkies, short-range AM broadcasting kits, cellphones, and guitar amp's can all be handy tools for degrading signal quality. Mixing in a second track of static and interference will further trash the resulting broadcast.

Most multi-effects proccessors like the Eventide H7600 will offer hundreds of different presets to give you different kinds of effects like the ones you described.
 
THe static bursts are usually called sqelch. A plugin that can do a lot of what your looking for is Vinyl
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/

And it's free.

THough rerecording it through a real speaker in roughly the space it is in in the film will sound better (probably) and be quicker (probably).
 
While it may seem totally obvious, you can simulate this effect by sending the sound thru the appropriate device (speaker, walkie-talkie) and mic'ing it.
 
Yep, walkie talkie, a great suggestion. There IS also the Sans-Amp audio plug-in. If you have it or buy it, I'll send you the exact settings I use. I'll post a few examples in a moment.

I also bought a bunch of Sigtronics aviation microphone elements for my actors. Nothing can simulate the mouth right up against the mic (like it is on a pilot etc...).

That's whay I like (and also use) the walkie talkie effect. Only problem with that (which it is for me) is if your talent is not located near your studio.



OK, here's the version with the Sigtronics Mic.
 

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BTW, SiliconAudioLabs - that sounded awesome! That's exactly what I'm trying to do - do you know of there is a term used to describe that effect, or do people just call it 'walkie-talkie' or something?
 
Azirithdorr said:
BTW, SiliconAudioLabs - that sounded awesome! That's exactly what I'm trying to do - do you know of there is a term used to describe that effect, or do people just call it 'walkie-talkie' or something?
Click to expand...

I gotta tell ya something about this process (called "over intercom" or "over landline").

We went through quite a bit a wrestling on this process as the usual way to do this is to use two feeds (tracks) in tandem. One is the direct voice from the ADR studio (or your wild takes etc...) and in addition to that, the "over intercom" feeds which are usually miced up Auratone speakers. Or as mentioned above - walkie talkies.

This is the way you will usually hear this effect in most "Hollywood" or major releases. I think that way works OK, it is intelligible but kinda not really that real sounding.

Now, the takes I posted were for a large military contractor (I work w/ Boeing, NASA, Lockheed, Bell Helicopter, Northrop to name a few), and they HATED the usual method. They claimed it just wasn't the way it "really" sounds. They were 100% correct.

So I bought what is usually used in the tanks, sigint rooms, helicopters, jets, etc... and they liked them and happily signed off on the results.

So, you can get a hold of a few mic elements from Sigtronics Aviation. They are a GREAT company! DO **NOT** wire them into your console for 48v phantom. You will smoke them. There's a box from "Flightcom" http://www.flightcom.net/intercoms/IIsx-intercom.php that you just plug the mics right into and then plug the box right into your laptop or console. The Flightcom is used to record conversations and such between pilot & co-pilot. That box and mic will get you 90% there. And I think you can get the mics from them too.

If you still want it grungier use a digital guitar amplifier simulator like Sans-Amp or whatever. Once inside the amp simulator roll off the highs and lows and go very easy on the distortion.
 
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