Adding Robotic/Vocoder effect to your song using Audacity.

Have you heard songs where it appears as if a robot is singing a line instead of a person ? Want that effect for your songs ? Now you can. Yes we can !

You will need Audacity ( comes for windows/Linux/Mac – I use the linux one, pretty much the same as the others ) , the vocoder plugin ( which will automatically be there if you install the latest audactiy version. ) Here’s what to do :

1. Load up your song.

2. If your song is stereo ( has two tracks, Left and right, ), split the track into left and right, by clicking on the small arrow that is there in the control box to the left of the track.

Once the track has been split into left and right tracks, select  the entire right track, and then replace it with a sound that has a high amplitude to it, like a synth lead or a rave lead . Or, for experimenting, just with noise. To generate white noise, Click Generate -> Noise -> White.

3. Then recombine the left and right tracks to form a stereo track. Do this by again clickin on the small arrow to the left of the lef track, and selecting ‘Make stereo track’.

4. Now, in Effects->Plugins, select Vocoder. You might want to play with the settings a bit, but a higher number of vocoder bands mean a higher quality of robotic sound, and a lower value would mean more noise.

Apply the effect and enjoy a slightly robotic voice ! To get a more robotic voice, you would like to have a sound with more energy in it. If I had to exemplify, it would be something like a lot of synth organs playing. Like a cathedral noise with lots of strings ( cello/violins/hurdy-gurdy ) but synchronized. Luckily, I had such a song, ( The Undertaker’s WWE entrance theme played using a synth organ kinda instrument ), so my effect sounds realistic. With white noise, it won’t sound very robotish, so you need a proper sound which is in tune, unlike noise, as your carrier ( more on carriers below ).

Basically, how is works is that to vocode, the plugin needs two signals – one is the carrier signal ( the synth lead sound or the noise – in the right track ), and the other is the main sound that we want to vocode ( your song – in the left track ).  The vocoder  does the rest.

It was good for playing around, so I thought I’d let everyone know – there’s a tonne of cool plugins for audacity and it’s fun to play around with them, so by all means experiment !!

Next time, I’m trying the Pitch Snap effect ( commonly known as the T-Pain effect ? )

BTW, if you have windows and FL Studio ( Fruity Loops), you might want to visit http://www.warbeats.com , an awesome site for people interested in composing/mixing/merging music. Some really nice music stuff out there !