"Pilots Voice" Sound effect question

Whats up guys, question for you all.

I'm developing an effects sequence that involves alot of cockpit compositing. Everything was going well until I tried to add the "pilots voice" audio. I will be wearing a genuine USAF oxygen mask, so it is a necessity.

Now I have seen all the various tutorials on making your voice sound like a telephone, storm trooper or what have you.

I know its accomplished by using the band pass filter, and adjusting some settings. I read several tutorials to get a better understanding, and tweaked the settings for hours, but I still can't get it to sound right. It sounds like a "voice thats being altered to emulate a pilots voice."

I'm wondering if A. anyone has some audio from a successful test that I could listen to and B. if you could help me out and see what I'm doing wrong.


Thanks alot for the assistance.

gallion311

 

Keep in mind where you're hearing the pilot. Are you hearing the person in someone else's cockpit? on the ground? or in the same cockpit as he talks to someone else.

You have to make decisions based on where the sound is coming from. And that means every possible sound you might hear should be there. For example, if you're in a HQ camp (in a building), you'd probably hear a lot of talking if there's a dogfight going on, steps on the ceramic tile flooring, various other pilots talking (yes using some type of bandpass filter, but I'd use it lightly with perhaps a little bit of a flange). If you're in a cockpit, you're going to hear the engine very loudly and other pilots, guns, etc.

But the key ingredient you're missing is most pilots in the air force have a mask on that's much different than a stormtrooper's mask. A stormie has much more room in his helmet so the effect is more open...but an airforce mask is much more rubbery from what I can tell and thick. That means if anything, you'll want a muffled sound. That means you can either physically talk with your hands cupped around your mouth into the mic, or you can turn up the bass and take out a bit of the treble to get a similar effect.

Keith

 

I was wondering how to make that sound effect, can you give me a link to a good tutrial plaese

 

Yeah, I had actually tried recording with a decent mic, with my hands cupped around it. When that didnt work, I stuck a tiny mic inside the mask, and recorded. So that way I'd get the actual muffle from the mask, but again, not even close.

The tutorials I have deal with Soundforge, although I know the effect can be done using Goldwavem which is a free SFX program.

Heres the tutorial I have:

TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
I'm sure you've heard this effect before in many pop songs. It makes the vocal sound as if it is being heard over a telephone receiver. This type of effect is very easy to do in Sound Forge:
1) Select your audio data.
2) Choose Process > EQ > Parametric.
3) Choose the Phone Line Effect preset. The settings for this preset are: Filter Style = Band-pass, Center Frequency = 800, Band Width = 2, Amount = -25dB, and Output Gain = 0dB.
4) Click OK.


Heres an update; I went to a site that sells these masks, and mask accessories and there is a cable adapter that converts the audio plug for "civilian use". By this rational I should be able to plug the mask right into my pc, or my digital 4 track and record. Only problem...the cable costs $132, which is not what I wanted to hear.

Back to the drawing board...

 

Try posting what you've done so far. I've never had an issue just cutting out the low and high ends, and tacking on a tiny bit of distortion to taste.

 

Alright good idea.

http://www.ryangallion.com/pilot_voice.htm

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a crack at it.

gallion311

 

Well, okay.

One: Enounciate more clearly.2
Two: Try killing your lower and higher ends a little more drastically, especially the low end.
Three: Go ahead and tack a teeny bit of distortion onto it. May or may not help.

 

I agree with Funk-E; it's a bit hard to catch what you're saying before the signal is processed. It sounds as if you might have your mic a bit too close to your mouth. Some mics work okay like that, but some need more "nose sound" to reproduce voices properly.

Anyway, it's a bit unclear whether you're aiming for an "Air Force pilot" sound (from what you've written), or a "Star Wars pilot" sound (from what you say in the clip).

For an Air Force pilot sound, it's fairly straight-forward. Add a bit of compander-type distortion, then filter, then possibly add a bit more distortion. The filtering should pretty much remove everything below about 300 Hz, then roll up fairly steeply, and then what you do with the top end (above about 3-4 KHz) has more to do with keeping the speech intelligible than anything else. In Adobe Audition, for example, there's a FFT Filter effect that lets you draw pretty much any response curve that you want. The shape of the curve between 300 Hz and about 1 KHz is what gives the effect its timbre.

Here's a quick example. It's a bit ringy perhaps, but I was trying to maximise the clarity of the speech.

For Star Wars pilot sounds, there's generally more processing. Some people claim that the voices were actually recorded over short-wave radio, or similar, but personally I think that they were probably processed by Ben Burtt, using the ring modulator in the ARP 2600.

 

yeah, sorta sounds like you're talking into a sock.

 

Here's my two-minute crack at it using just basic EQ tools. Just to add more stuff to consider.

 

Dually noted about the pronunciation thing, sorta doin a G.W. thing at the end there.

Anyway, thanks DV and Mister X, both of yours sound better than mine did.

What programs did you use?

I take it by your message that you used Adobe Audition Mister X, is that accurate? Would you be willing to jot down the settings in more of a "tutorial" form. I know little about sound effects development, so some of those terms are right over my head.

Thanks again.

PS. I am going for the Air-force Pilot effect, I just happened to be sitting in a Naboo Starfighter instead of an F-14.

 

I just threw an EQ on the clip with Audacity. Soundforge was an option but I was getting called for lunch so I wanted to be quick.

Good luck!

 

Another thing you didn't do once you filtered it with the bandpass was normalize the audio afterwards to bring it up to the same volume level as it was before the filter. You have to do that.

Keith

 

Here's a very quick and dirty Audition Workflow:

In Edit view (I don't think you can use the FFT filter in a Multitrack rack) apply the Effect Special > Distortion. Choose the "Bow Curve1" or "Bow Curve 2" Preset; these are mild compressor settings.

Next, apply Filters > FFT Filter and choose the "OnHold 400-->4k" Preset.

In both cases, finessing the effect is just a matter of tweaking the curves until you like what you hear. One little "tip": For the FFT filter, you might get a bit of "whistling", which is mathematically accurate for what you're asking the filter to do. Reducing the FFT size (which is set at 2048 for the "OnHold" preset, try maybe 800) sort of breaks up the whistling into noise, which is more Lo-Fi sounding.

 

Neat. I should give that a try myself.

How would you do it on Amadeus 2, it's a sound editor for Macintosh. If you can't figure it out, how would you do it for Audacity?