Anybody here talkbox?

I’m looking for a good MMV patch similar to roger troutman. ANy suggestiond on programming?
thanks
Josh

A good starter is “Compton Lead” in Bank 3 patch 67.

Great for “California Love” or similar Zapp tunes. It can stand to be tweaked a little, but it’s a great talkbox template.

i received my rocktron banshee yesterday. Today i recorded a short snipped:
http://www.psicolor.de/music/Psicolor_-_Ich_mach_Geduedel.mp3
If you understand german, it could be funny for you, since in bavaria vacation started today :wink:

Currently i feed my talkbox with simply osc1 and 2 both at 16’, osc 3 at 4’, mixed, filter open, no resonance, no filter modulation and very spare volume envelope (just a little bit of release).

sorry I have an OS voyager so I can’t help with preset patches, but keep in mind that roger talkbox patches were quite simple ones and he generally used a yamaha DX7 for them. no problem you can do 99% the same patches with any synth you have. but also keep in mind that talkboxing is quite a complex art in itself, and that it not only depends on the synth patch you’re using. you also need a proper articulation technique, both in synth playing and in moving your mouth. then you need to make sure you got a properly placed mic able to pick-up all of the ‘t’, ‘s’, ‘tch’ and all of those noises and breathing sounds that your mouth makes and that the talkbox cannot help you reproducing. you can find nice explicative videos on youtube. a good talkbox sound is always made of a mixture: nice synth patch + properly articulated consonants and noises straigth out of your mouth into the mic!

as for synth patches:
what you need is a patch which is very rich in harmonics, so that your mouth can properly filter them out.
a very basic roger patch would be:
1 osc, sawtooth waveform. filter cutoff nearly 100% open. try with some resonance but keep the filter open. monophonic sound (ok no prob here with the voyager :slight_smile:
then to make your talbox sound more expressive you can add some small amount of pitch glide and, more important, some mod-wheel controlled vibrato to be thrown on long notes, just like real singers do.

I have Osc2 sync’d. Normally the best sound is 1 osc, but sometimes I’ll flip on Osc2 in the mixer and fiddle with its pitch. Really does some strange formant shifting, especially on longer notes. A nice alternative to the usual LFO vibrato.

I talkbox. I uually just start by loading the init parameters, dialing up a nice sawtooth wave and letting that single osc do its thing with the filter open all the way.

Some purists seek out that yamaha keyboard he uses…the exact model escapes me at the moment.



Eric