Building a Talkbox

[MattAnonymous]

Will this actually work or am I waisting my time.  Are there any other shems? http://www.blamepro.com/talkboxG.htm

[Travis]

GGG has a nice little page on them:
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/v2/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=127&op=page&SubMenu=

[petemoore]

Quality Components
 Few more...these are easy to put together once you get the pieces, the amp and driver deliver the tone...need a good PA
 I built one with a littel tube amp and an Altec 808A driver and it worked great

[ExpAnonColin]

There's one in the EPFM, too.  Check eBay, there are often "broken" ones, or just ones that go really cheap in general that you can clean up for maybe $20.

-Colin

[MattAnonymous]

I got 2 PA speakers with a horn tweeter and woofer for free and I'm using the driver of one of the horns.  This should work right?

[smoguzbenjamin]

I'd say use 'em if they're good speakers and you're not going to regret pulling one apart

[Jun]

I was able to see what kind of set up 'Zapp' had when I was a house engineer for a club here in Monterey.  They had a Yamaha DX-100 into a 200 watt amp you would see at your local high school driving a mid-range driver.  It must have been driven very hard because without any amplification it was very loud. Apparently the trick is to whisper the words.
Jun

[smoguzbenjamin]

It's probably louder than anyhting you've ever felt in your mouth!

[Mike Burgundy]

Beware of using hi-freq. horn drivers for talkboxes, unless they are really, really sturdy. A Hi-Mid driver will work.
You want a mid-range (usually they also do high) driver, or a very hefty one if it's range is significantly above 1kHz.
Anything below 300-500Hz doesn't really work in a talkbox anyway, so filter that out (experiment). You can use a driver below it's spec'd range, but keep the wattage *low* if you do so.
That said, I've built one with an old, not-too-strong Beyma 1KHz driver that works absolutely fine.

[thumposaurus]

I got 2 PA speakers with a horn tweeter and woofer for free and I'm using the driver of one of the horns.  This should work right?

That's what I used in the one I built, I've been driving it with a smokey that the cig box fell apart on.

[petemoore]

Watchout pumping bass into that horn...one peak is enough to blow the diaphram right off the coil.
 Super high amplitude waves injected into the mouth can cause tooth damage, and cause your tongue to become lengthened.

[bobbletrox]

Wow...ya know, I've never known how a talkbox really works until now.  The amp's output actually gets piped into your mouth?!

[smoguzbenjamin]

Yeah. When you talk, doesn't air get pumped into your mouth by your lungs? Now you're not using your lungs but your horn driver to push air into your mouth, then you shape the sounds by changing the shape of your mouth

[Lurco]

Roger (Zapp) Troutman (R.I.P.) used sawtoothy string sounds from his Yamaha, and had a special (low-leveled) Micky-Mouse-voice kinda way to speak/sing into the "tube".

[Mark Hammer]

A few things to remember about talkboxes:

1) All the acoustic content from the driver makes its way from the driver to your mouth via a plastic tube.  The tube itself has VERY limited bandwidth at both ends of the spectrum.

2) The human mouth is optimized for the manipulation of harmonic and resonant content within a fairly narrow bandwidth as well.

For both these reasons....

a) Advice against trying to get bass into the mouth is well-founded since the mouth cavity can't do anything with it and the tube can't effectively convey it.

b) Mid-rangehorn drivers are optimal sources of converting the guitar signal into something that efficiently conveys the key content to the mouth via a tube.  They can also handle whopping output which helps to overcome the inefficiency of the plastic tube and mouth.

Having said that, mid-range drivers are not the only source that can be used, merely one that is more or less "ideal".  You can also stick a funnel over a modest-sized speaker and get something usable, although it may need some EQ-ing to reduce the honking arising out of the resonant cavity created by the "opposing funnels" (speaker cone facing a funnel).

Since content below the fundamental frequencies of speech (300hz and less for most humans) is moot, it's probably also a good idea to have some sort of dedicated filtering for the mic element.  Since that leaves you with a kind of wimpy signal, it is probably a good idea to mix the throat-modulated content with some straight signal to fill in the low end.

So, what I'm thinking of is this.  Guitar goes to a frequency spectrum divider.  The bottom of the signal is lowpass filtered and fed to a two input mixer.  Content above 300hz or so goes to the miniamp, speaker, tube, mouth, mic, a highpass filter and off to the mixer.  The mixer itself probably needs to have a simple gating function of some kind built into it since there is risk of feedback.

Ideally, you also wanted the shortest route between speaker and mic/mouth, since the tube eats up both signal and bandwidth.  Personally, I suspect a mini-amp attached to its own mic stand with *maybe* a 2ft length of tubing, max, between speaker and mic, would work well.

[Lonehdrider]

All I can say is "Do you feel like we do?"

Regards,

Lone