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5. Distorted, telephone-style vocal effects

1 Open your DAW, set the tempo to 136bpm, then import Vocal.wav and BeatsAndBass.wav onto separate audio tracks. The vocal (taken from 194’s VIP Series - InsideInfo pack) is a wellrecorded MC part, but we’re going to rough it up, thin it out and add distinctive character with SilverLine effects. Begin by loading Decimort 2 as an insert on the vocal channel. 2 Let’s first use Decimort 2’s band-pass filter to thin the vocal out. Switch the filter to Pre, placing it before the other stages in the signal path, then change the Type to Band-pass ( BP), the Cutoff to 1550Hz and the Resowidth to 35%. Push the Preamp dial up to +4.5dB for a little input drive, then pull back the Output Volume to -1.5dB to re-level. 3 Our vocal now sounds like it’s coming from a bandwidth-reduced telephone or speaker, but we can use Decimort 2’s other features to make it sound like our MC has been sampled into a crunchy hardware sampler. Reduce the sample rate by pulling the Resampler Frequency knob back to roughly 14000Hz, adding distinctive digital aliasing. 4 The Resampler section’s Jitter control randomly varies the Resampler Frequency, akin to a classic sampler. Turn this up to around 15% to add extra treble grit. Our effect is rather harsh and piercing in the top end, so turn on the Images Filter and pull the Frequency Shift knob back to 17% to tame the effect. 5 Let’s apply lush width to the vocal. While excelling at extreme flanging tasks, Antresol can also be used as a cool mono-to-stereo spatialiser: insert it on the vocal track, toggle the M/S Mode button to enable independent processing of the mid and side channels, then crank the Channel X-Fade up to the maximum 0/100%. This creates width by swapping and offsetting the mid and side channels. 6 To finish our vocal processing, we can add a huge amount of unnatural vibe and character by creatively crushing the vocal’s dynamics with extreme limiting. Insert Frontier – already yours for free in Plugins – next in the vocal chain, then set its Output Volume to -22.5dB and Threshold to around -43dB. The result is a drastically transformed vocal that’ll stand out in any mix.