Week #50 - Smugness

Computer generated voice? Check. Hip-hop beat? Check. Copious frogs? Check.



Description:

The lyrics here are just nonsense. For some reason frogs are the animal I associate with being smug, but I really just wanted to mess around with the vocoder. I wanted to use a computer generated voice as the modulator and needed some words. The carrier is a synth patch. I tried to go with the frog theme and make a swampy liquid synth sound, but it wasn't very intelligible so I ended up tweaking it into a harsher sound. The rest of the tracks are a slightly faster than usual hip-hop beat with drums, bass, organ and guitar.

Tools:

Propellerhead Record 1/Reason 4
Babolka text to voice software
Epiphone Les Paul Custom electric guitar

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Notes:

- I spent a lot of time trying to get the "voice" on this track to work. Not sure I was successful here. I basically used a program called Balbolka to generate a computerized voice. I chopped the resulting WAV file up and placed it over my beat. I then set up a synth with a vocoder and used the computer voice to modulate it. To me getting synth setting that are intelligible is always the toughest part of using a vocoder. I thought starting with a computerized voice instead of a human voice might help, but it really didn't. If anything, it made getting a usable sound even harder. Recycling the computer voice before importing it also may have made things easier, though I kind of like how stilted the cadence is and how it isn't really perfectly in time.

- The rest of the track under the voice is just a 24-bar hip-hop beat with bass organ and guitar playing around Bm/Em - one beat for 15 1/2 bars, a transition, 7 bars of a variation, and then another transition back to the original beat. Not much to say about it other than that I used a Redrum abstract hip-hip kit from the factory sound bank for the beat, bass and organ patches from previous productions, and a Line6 preset for the amp sim on the guitar. The beat is probably my favorite part, and I'm pretty happy with the bass line, but the organ and guitar didn't really work as well as I'd hoped. I tried using the Regroove mixer at the end to get the everything to gel better. I only wish it were possible to apply the Regroove settings to audio tracks as well as MIDI as I couldn't manipulate the guitar without either recycling it to generate MIDI or rerecording it along with the other parts.

- Since most of the sounds I chose already had pretty hefty FX chains on them (especially a lot of compression), the mix was accomplished with just Record's mixer - the EQ to try and carve out a space for each sound, some reverb on everything, and the master compressor.


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