There’s this effect that I’ve heard in a couple of songs. The best way that I can describe it is the way that some video game characters talk (especially animal crossing) where they’re speaking gibberish but it also sounds robotic somehow.
Two songs with an example of this sound:
My Head Hurts -strxwberrymilk
Sunshine Recorder -Boards of Canada
For the first one, the sound I’m talking about comes in at about 1:30, and for the second it comes in at about 2:50.
Really interested in recreating this sound. Any ideas as to how to achieve this are welcome.
Edit: found the sound I was looking for. It’s called glitch: https://illformed.org/
I’ve never made this specific effect before, but it kind of sounds like…
First, they ran the vocals through a telephone eq filter
Then there’s either going to be a glitch effect on the vocals, or maybe there’s some sort of fade that is connected to a trigger so that they can get the rapid cutout of the vocals.
There used to be this really great free plugin that was a VST that added randomized glitch effects to whatever track you played it on and I couldn’t tell you the name of it, I just, I remember it being “glitch 1.3”, and it had made sounds similar to these, Which is why I’m thinking glitch effect, but I don’t know who made the glitch VST or where you can find it now.
I think on the StrxwberryMilk one, they then actually put an echo effect over the clipped vocals afterwards
It’s literally called Glitch - the 1.3 windows version is available free: https://illformed.org/
Sounds exactly like what I was looking for. What a cool plugin. Thank you.
Ooh, thanks for this. For the glitch one, is it similar to bitcrusher?
Don’t have the time to listen to those right now to confirm it, but generally, reversing the vocal track?
No, not quite. Reversing it could be part of the process but there’s definitely some other effects in there.
Got around to listening, and yeah these are like heavy on effects in general, so it’s gonna be hard to point out any one thing. Possibly octave, bit crusher, reversed, idk.
For the BoC track it sure sounds like it’s a granular synth / effect with some EQing in front of it. There are a million granular synths now and I’m afraid I don’t have one to recommend, but you could research what they might have been using back in 2002 when there would have been fewer options.
