fuzz best suited for vocals?

[thumposaurus]

I know it sounds like a strange request, but I let my friend use a fuzz jade I built for a performance with his band, and while he liked how it sounded he thought it was a little too much.  Sooo...my question is would there be a schematic around or a tweaking to an existing one that might work for what he's trying to do?
Thanks in advance.
Ps-the groups music is kinda experemental folk meets electronica.

[Peter Snowberg]

One thing you might want to try is to split the mic signal, fuzz one of the signals up, and then mix them back down to "flavor" the vocals without shredding them too much. That way you still have total control over how hard the processing is and how much of it you hear.

This works wonders with some extreme fuzzes on guitar. If you rely on driving the fuzz less, you don't get as many character options.

Take care,
-Peter

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Suppose you had a vocoder, and ran the voice thru a fuzz & used fuzzed voice as the carrier, and unprocessed voice as the controller, then you would have your dynamics maintained.

[petemoore]

Er whatever you call an RM type clone...
 It sounded somewhat like voice through a midranged PA horn...cool efkt I think...whatch closely for feedback...I did it at loud bedroom level.

[LP Hovercraft]

The Anderton/Paia Quadrafuzz is a pretty cool one to mess around with on vocals.  Very versatile!

[Mike Burgundy]

Tht would be the way to go - distort different frequency bands separately, perhaps combined with a blend of the original signal. The 2-5kHz band is very, very important for intelligibility, so you might distort that one less.
Could be a cool experiment - don't think there's a lot of distorters around that retain enough of the original to understand what's being said.

[Marcos - Munky]

http://www.geocities.com/munkydiy/voicedoubler.jpg
Don't know how it sounds.

[Mark Hammer]

Depends what it is you want to achieve.

Bear in mind that humans are so intimately acquainted with what a human voice is supposed to sound like, that it doesn't take much for it to sound "unnatural".  For instance, even though a filtered voice intended to mimic what you hear over the telephone is not distorted any more than your average MP3,  it sounds very unnatural.  The same filtering applied to a guitar just makes it sound a little different.

So, if you wanted it to simply sound "stressed", my guess is that it wouldn't take much distortion at all to do so, providing it was also filtered.  Heck, assuming the input level was set right, I imagine a Tube Screamer would be more than sufficient to create that effect.

If anything, the more critical component would be providing the right sort of input signal to the device doing the distorting.  Two things stand in the way there: a) you can't just plug a voice mic into a fuzzbox without any sort of appropriate gain/preamp stage in between, and b) the speaker needs to assure their voice signal does not inadvertently drop below the clipping threshold.  Voice has a "softer" envelope than does a plucked string, so it is tricky to set the distortion level/amount when you don't have that initial transient to use as a reference point.  I imagine a compressor would be absolutely indispensable here in keeping the voice signal in the critical range at all times, no matter what happens to the speaker's/singer's breathing or whatever.

Also, note that distortion tends to be pleasingly obvious to listeners when it can add lots of lower-order harmonics.  With plucked strings, those tend to die out pretty quickly so fuzzes help to keep them more evident longer.  Of course, voice has the capacity to *add* harmonics over time (ever listen to a really pissed off baby?), not unlike a tenor sax, so the distorting device doesn't really have quite as much work to do with voice, compared to guitar.  This is probably why sometimes all you really need is some bandpass filtering to make the mids more prominent and it automatically sounds "stressed".

[MarkB]

I've used a Boss DS-1 for year when I want to record a distorted vocal... seems to work best with an old crappy Radio Shack $15 mic.
"-)

[Gearbuilder]

hI,
Woah, i did the same thing than you there's a long time ago (maybe 12 years )during a recording session, but not with a cheap mike,i used a sm57 an the trick to add more distortion was to record not the DS1 directly in the desk but we put the DS1  in a Marshall  Studio 15 with preamp distortion and we miked the speaker and mix this with a straight signal from a SM58! The singer was looking at us and like we were  experimenting during his session ,he didn't understand what we want to do,none of us too, but at the  end when he went to ear the result,he was very very happy,and even the boss  from the studio came to see me and said to me :hey what a f,,,,,g sound ,since 20 years in the studios i never ear a voice like that!I was very proud of that   !
Always mix distorted voice with a dry  signal ,like that you're not sounding like a robot!
Bruno

[troubledtom]

wha-metalzone-delay.............evil :twisted:
         - tom

[brett]

This sounds weird, but you might try it.

YELL into an old-fashioned headphone (plug the cord to a mike socket).  I've got an old WWII headset that works very well as a mike.  In fact it had so many buzzes/resonances that it would feed back excessively unless I stuffed on old handkerchief in behind the speaker cone (which was made of metal (!)).

I swear this worked really well.  It does compression, distortion and filtering all in one :twisted:

[computerjones]

megaphone.  i imagine thats how most distorted vocals you hear in main stream recordings are made, unmistakable.

[thumposaurus]

This sounds weird, but you might try it.

YELL into an old-fashioned headphone (plug the cord to a mike socket).  I've got an old WWII headset that works very well as a mike.  In fact it had so many buzzes/resonances that it would feed back excessively unless I stuffed on old handkerchief in behind the speaker cone (which was made of metal (!)).

I swear this worked really well.  It does compression, distortion and filtering all in one :twisted:

heh funny you should mention that, I actually built one of those type of things years ago, it's an old koss headphone, and the jack is mounted in a filmcanister that dangles from about 1/2 an inch of cord, it is very good for yelling into.
Some interesting ideas here too I'll have to do some more research on some of them, and see what comes of it.
The one thing I was thinking of today at work was alot of bass effects have a mix knob to controll the amount of affected signal and the straight tone, the reason is to preserve the fundamental tone of the instrument yes?  Wouldn't it work the same for the voice?  It would seem like a lot simpler arrangment than the splitting the signal then recombining it, and simple is a lot better since I can't be at all of the gigs to help out if something goes wrong.

[Rory]

I've used MANY distortion boxes for recording.  Big muffs, rats, expandoras, fuzz factory, bazz fuss, and tons others.  My recommendation would be to try as many as you can out!  Its not only fun, but you get a feel for each one and what it is capable of (or not so capable of).  My favorite one was the rat, set for a slightly dirty guitar sound.  Cool stuff!