Moog Music Forum

How do you do the "vocal" effect. Like the ones on "See You" by Depeche Mode, "Blue Monday" by New Order, and "Showroom Dummies" and "Neon Lights" by Kraftwerk????

Ha ha, funny you should ask that, I have also wondered how the vocal sound on "see you" with depeche was made. when listening to it, it sounds very much like quite narrow puls with lfo on it and not to much resonance. One should realize that it also is monophonic with just 1 voice. I beleive it is a PPG wave 2.0 doing that sound. I have actually tried to do it myself, but I don't seem to get i right sad because it is a really nice sound. Unfortunately I don't have the song available at the moment (at work) to analyze it further. hope this will help you some atleast

/Jonas

I have not had the time to try it recently. I've been working night shifts. But anyway, I did not say i wanted to recreate that exact sound, I wanted something similar.

I'll have to give it a try later.

That's cool, overall it is quite hard to do vocal sounds, it's that real knifesharp edge with the cutoff, resonace and filter tracking.

Hey,

To do vocal sounds you need to know the formant frequencies (do a web search or email privately and I will search my books). Formants are regions of high energy concetration within the frequency spectrum. Generally speaking, you need to have several bandpass filters adjusted to the formant frequencies. Filters should be configured in parallel. Convincing vocal sounds are really hard to synthesize and I don't think that you can make them with the Voyager. However, any modular will do. Other than that you could try synthesizers that can do physical modeling, such as the Nord Modular G2 or any Korg with MOSS installed.

It's years since I've heard `See You' so it's hard to comment with any accuracy.

The vocal effects may be the PPG, though I have a vague feeling Blackwing Studios got caught out by the change PPG made to their spec for the Wave 2.2, which was supposed to support the Waveterm sampler but turned out not to when the latter finally appeared. Depeche used sampling later, of course, but I'm not sure if they could sample vocals on the Wave at that point.

It may be useful to know something about one of the synths I know they did use on `See You' though - especially considering some of the remarks made earlier in this topic.

They used a synth called the Kobol, from French company RSF. This was a keyboardless module. One of the special features of the Kobol was that the waveforms were completely variable. Instead of switching from square/pulse to sawtooth, sine etc, you could turn a knob and move smoothly through all the intervening frequencies.

I'd expect the Kobol could process an external signal, so it may have been used for vocal treatments.

All this is a long time ago, of course. But looking up info on that synth and considering it in conjunction with the sound of that record may be a useful starting-point, perhaps.

How accessible is Daniel Miller? Would it be possible to contact him?

The furthest I got was his secretary. You can certainly contact Mute but I don't know whether your' ll get to the man himself. By the way, there is an interview with him in a magazine (Keyboard I think...) along with lovely pics of his studio). I mean that EMS Synthi 100 is a mamooth!