Pedals for vocals

The Lounge Other Gear
1

As suggested by @aloud, I will make my post on the Chase Bliss thread into a topic so we can collect good demos.

It‘s great that Chase Bliss included a demo with vocals in the demo video for Mood 2. I always feel like I should experiment more with vocals and pedals, but there are few demos out to get an idea about whether a pedal works for vocals or not. Mood 2 sounds more promising than Microcosm in that department. So if any of you use it for vocals, I am very thankful for demos. Should work fine with MK I mono sound.

As this is a new thread, any other suggestions are welcome.

I sometimes use Arp3 on Microcosm for some cool repeats of vocals (as does @Tchu). It otherwise tends to pitch the signal too much for my taste. Or it’s modulating just too much in a quite unpredictable way, so vocals mostly sound bad.

I‘ve also tried out Meris Hedra for some hatmonizing. I‘m sure you could get it to work great, but I hated the controls, so I sold it after a month. It also required a basic knowledge of scales to dial in fitting harmonies, which where then buried in shift functions.

2

Here’s the demo of Red Panda Particle. It starts with simple enough delay, then some variations on it (reverse, random), and some pitch shifting.

Maybe there is something you like the sound of.

3 Likes
3

Was going to suggest this, I feel like it’s the only other vocal demo I’ve seen on a pedal that stood out.

Only other demos of vocal effects I can think of are Rachel Collier playing with the Roland Aira E4, but other than that I believe she mostly uses Ableton.

1 Like
4

I think they are no longer produced, but there is a company called TC-Helicon that produced a range of vocal FX pedals. One of my favorites was the VOICETONE X1. Very cool pedal for telephone/megaphone/distortion FX.

EDIT: Looks like they still make them

5

Some algos sound nice. Most of them are way too intense to really use them in a track for my taste. Will dig a bit more into how much you can tame the effects. I would prefer demos that showcase how to actually use these in a track/song rather than demonstrating how crazy the effects can get. Maybe a granular plugin or synth would be much more useful to shape vocals?

There’s a nice Habit demo from Chase Bliss that explains how Courtney Swain actually made an album with it:

Found the video quite impressive, but the album not so much.

3 Likes
6

Yeah, I agree. My favourite was the reverse delay, which is a fairly common effect, but this one sounded nice - it wasn’t that obvious reverse delay you’ve heard a thousand times, a bit more subtle I think. The random delay (IIRC) was also nice. But the pitch shifting algos (or settings in that video) wasn’t that pleasing to my ears, too intense like you said.

1 Like
7

SOMA Cosmos + vocals. Although it isn’t strictly an FX pedal, more a ‘drifting’ looper, with delay, reverb and granular algos.

1 Like
8

For me ZOIA has been the best for vocals, because you can tailor it to fit your needs.
Because for vocals to sound really good and “studio ready” there has to be a decent amount of EQ and what not on it so just running vocals into a FX pedal didn’t really reach the quality I wanted to reach.

My vocal patch (which is in pre alpha status) I’m designing now has compressor and EQ at the first stage of the patch, this way I can sculpt the incoming audio to my liking and then apply cool effects to it.

1 Like
9

Those are the exact two effects I liked. We seem to be on the same page, so I’m looking forward to listening to that Cosmos demo (although it’s a bit pricey).

@MichaalHell: Would you mind sharing the patch when it’s ready? A friend of mine has a Zoia, so we could play around with it. Agreed on the whole EQing part. But I would run the vocals from Ableton into a pedal, so that shouldn’t be that much of an issue. I’ve ditched the idea of running vocals live through a pedal.

1 Like
10

Yeah that will make it a lot easier. Me not having any DAW worth mentioning can really be a PITA for this reason.

I am not actively working on it per se, I’m more working on it in sprints so it might take a while. But I can definetly share it. I might forget though so please feel free to hit me up at any point!

2 Likes
11

No hurries! Do you mind sharing what the patch is supposed to do to your vocals?

If anyone has good suggestions or even videos on how to work with samples on OT or in granular, I would also be very curious.

Vocals used to be my main „instrument“ and I‘ve neglected them for about two years now to finally learn more about how to make songs. I feel like now I‘m ready to get back more into vocals and maybe experiment with new stuff there as well.

12

The main thought is making a template where I can just connect a mic to ZOIA and get nice sounding audio.

so from that template I have a nice starting point for making whacky effects or reverbs and what not…

But I can try and focus on making more mangling effects, I have some ideas which I’m not sure will end up good or not, so I can explore that avenue for you.

1 Like
13

I have one of these. I haven’t used it much since I mainly use daw plug-ins if I’m ever recording vocals, but it’s pretty useful in a live context, or for trying out vocals while jamming out.

The interface is a bit clunky and not so fun to navigate when you’re trying to make your own patches, but there’s a lot of usable presets right out of the box. If you’re willing to deal with lots of menu diving and context sensitive buttons, the pedal had a lot of depth and you can really hone it in for precise applications or use it to mangle vocals beyond comprehension. I really like using it to make my voice sound lo fi and distorted.

14

Not been much of a singer historically but love the CBA Mood for this, as already highlighted.
Should try Microcosm and Habit too…and have had fun with Eventide PtichFactor in the past - being able to set a key/scale in the harmoniser algos is ace.

Not a pedal but picked up a TC Helicon Perform-VE as like the weirdness that seems possible with it and want to encourage myself to have fun in this domain as think I’ll enjoy it given a wee nudge and some confidence. The Perform-VE has some of that fun pitch/formant control that I enjoy about Soundtoys Little Altar Boy plus vocoding, fx, some auto-EQ polish, hard-tune etc. There’s a Red Means Recording vid that covers it better than I’ve seen anywhere else.

15

I’ve been trying various non-daw/non-rackmount simple vocal chain setups over the years and have found nothing has quite hit the sweet spot.

This is for my home studio setup in such a way that I can sing while using all my other gear. I’ve found that I almost always need my voice as a compositional aid since it allows me to intuitively unlock developments of musical ideas and unlock new harmonic progressions in a fun/easy manner. So having a solid (and fuck-upable!) vocal chain is something I’ve been hoping to be able to lock down.

I just ordered a used TC Helicon Perform-VE thanks to yokermoon’s post right above. I’ll report back on how it goes!

I’ve been really enjoying the “Exit Interviews for your Gear” thread, since it covers use-case nuances that don’t always show up in other threads. So below is a list of all the various vocal chains that I’ve tried before and why they just aren’t quite “the thing” for me.

Note that I didn’t purchase any of the below gear specifically to use for vocals, but since they had input functionality, I had to try them out. None of these are complaints, just want to list them here in case someone like me in the future is thinking “oo I’ll buy this gear and maybe it’ll also be useful for vocals in this way”.

The below were all using the Teenage Engineering CM-15, so no mic-pre was needed.

Mic → Digitakt Input
Like that it’s got verb/delay/panning/compression, but it’s missing a filter to roll off the low end prior to compression. Also I’d rather have the compression before it goes to the FX. And then the vocal signal combined with the regular Digitakt output, so I’m stuck with the Digitakt and vocal output together, which means if I want to use send effects, both have to go together… Outbox 8 might solve this? but without the eq in the chain, wouldn’t be worth getting the Outbox…

Mic → Syntakt FX Block
I’d really want a compressor in between the filter and the effects. And then similar output issues as the Digitakt.

Mic → Analog Heat+FX
Worked great! Chain was: Bitcrusher FX (only used the highpass filter on it to roll off the low end), heat (with noise gate!), then into compression, then into whatever else FX were needed. BUT I have too much fun using the AH+FX as a send on my mixer. I.e. the AH+FX is too useful for all of my gear to limit it to just the vocal chain. I also tend to find even moderate distortion on vocals to be terrible 97% of the time, so was only using three of the heat settings out of all of them. For an expensive box, couldn’t justify limiting it to just vocals.

Mic → Torso S4
A cool one! But wish I could change the order of FX for voice (always want EQ and compression right at the front before I start sculpting the sound further). Also similar to the AH+FX, feels like I’m way underutilizing it if I relegate it just to the vocal chain. This box comes alive for me when I treat it as an instrument unto itself or as a send on my mixer.

Mic → Teenage Engineering Sidekick
Great that’s it’s got EQ. The compression does not feel tuned for vocals (even lowest setting felt heavy-handed). Also the punch-in FX are neat, but there’s no way to just have them stay on indefinitely vs. jamming that weird squishy pad. I’ve tried those punch in fx with drum sources and the whole thing makes way more sense that way. So it doesn’t feel designed to support a dry set of vocals coming into it.

1 Like
16

You can by pressing select to record up to one bar of modulation that repeats until you press select or the squishy pad again. This also works per effect track, so you can have the repeating pattern on one and still free to play the other.