The vocal effects of Daft Punk
bjango.com
bjango.com
> This article is the longest piece I’ve published on Bjango’s site, and it took a couple of years of research. I purchased around 25 pieces of music gear. I emailed Imogen Heap, and to my surprise, someone from her team got back to me and confirmed the exact harmonizer used on Hide and Seek.
> It’s been a huge effort, and I’m confident it contains a lot of information that is not widely known. For those of you who are into Daft Punk, I hope it’s interesting.
No idea what she is listening to these days when doing those chores.
Anyway, I keep remembering how panned 'Human After All' was, and how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House", while this is EXACTLY how the genre evolved in the years to come and none of those music experts saw this.
Many journalists did a retrospective of it a few years later and admitted that they misjudged it.
It's not that Daft Punk drove the industry in this direction, the album wasn't well-received by most at that time. They showed the destination of a journey while people didn't even realize they are traveling...
In the end, it appears that 'Random Access Memories' is one of their least innovative and "lasting" albums. It's probably their most successful one, the most complex to conceptualize and produce, but IMO it has the least unique character of all their productions.
Looking at the whole picture, the product of "Random Access Memories" is less the music, but the duo celebrating the process of production itself...
And especially now it would perfectly blend with other Pharrell Williams Albums (i.e. "Happy" could have been on "Random Access Memories" without standing out at all...)
Yes, both soundtracks are amazing. But I wonder how amazing they'd have been without his input.
I didn’t know until you pointed it out that he worked on Kosinski’s other film too. There are definitely some huge similarities, especially with the end title tracks.
FWIW, I wouldn't call myself a particular fan of house or dance music in general. This mechanicalness and lack of warmth is probably what I like about the album.
It's dour. It's depressing. And it's repetitive in a way that feels tiresome; You can't dance to most of it or even really tap your foot to it.
What happened was that Daft Punk challenged themselves to make an album in six weeks and ended up with a showcase for a few neat guitar pedals and two fun songs (Robot Rock and Technologic), one of which consists almost entirely of a barely-changed sample (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwGQAEYqHs).
Electronic music certainly evolved in ways that made it less warm, but that didn't make it less fun. Case in point, Skrillex's early music is weird and playful despite relying on 'cold' synth sounds. Human After All is just cold.
Being robotic and repeatitive never stopped people dancing like crazy to techno all night. In fact, that's its very allure.
That's what I meant with what it has in common with garage and psych. Not the textures or sounds, but the relentlessly experimental approach to convention. Not saying it is perfectly executes, but I think this what it is meant to be.
It definitely has a theme, but unfortunately as executed it’s basically “what if we defied convention by using live instruments and making a shitty album?”
When you bring up psychedelic, experimental post-rock, I want to mention that one of my favorite bands is Battles. They’re a good example of what you can do when you defy convention!
I guess we like different artists for different reasons, and you like Daft Punk in boogie mode. Which I definitely get, as it is their strong suit. But I just think this is album is a bit of an anomaly in their catalogue and might require having to unlearn them a bit to dig it.
Their live album Alive 1997 would have to be my favourite of theirs btw. But I don't hate Human After All as many other fans do.
Speaking as someone who has been writing music for quite a long time, writing something that is objectively interesting (by being complex or unusual) is much, much easier than writing something that is just plain entertaining.
I think there's always something to be said for pushing boundaries, and I love experiencing any art or entertainment that makes me think "oh shit, I didn't know you could do that." But even then, that doesn't make it good or enjoyable, just interesting or thought-provoking. They're not mutually exclusive, but they also aren't necessarily correlated either.
R.A.M. is more that they'd decided to finish and made one last album that was as much fun as possible. It's a bit like "Accelerate" by REM in that respect.
Daft punk had a large impact on music overall, they were ( are? ) really really good musicians.
I guess there is the concept of a Rock Opera, but that doesn’t seem to have expanded much across the genres.
This Playlist has them all in order: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSdoVPM5WnndLX6Ngmb8wktMF...
Sorry, in retrospect my comment was a bit confusing.
The Sennheiser VSM201 sounds so clean, I really like the analogue sound. The TC Helicon Talkbox Synth also sounds nice.
For the harmonizers, the Digitech Studio Vocalist EX sounds the best to me, but I also like the Korg ih Interactive Vocal Harmony for its spacey vocal effects.
It’s hard to know without an official word from our favourite robots, but I think you’d struggle to get the sound of any Daft Punk song out of a VP-9000. I’m really not sure where that rumour started.
I almost bought a VP-9000 to test, but sonically it’s so far off, I didn’t bother.
If you don't have a vocoder, Behringer recently released one as a Eurorack module for $99. It's fine.
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...
Anyone here has any good article, or explanation, or theory, of why is that the case?
I guess you can get similar results with cheaper hardware, but if you have money and you have it around... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
His German WP page also claims that he sold a VSM 201 to Neil Young in 1982! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
English WP has less details on that part of his life, especially the VSM 201 :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
Just in time for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_(album) !!!
Oh, it also might be of interest that the IVL algorithm isn’t FFT-based. I think their harmonizers sound better than the rest, so maybe FFT isn’t the best way to go.
Has anyone got more details?
If you look at the code of (phone/voice) codecs GSM/Speex/Opus you can see that you can estimate the spectral envelope (or the configuration of a physical tube model for the vocal tract) in time domain with linear prediction coefficients (LPC).
And it is simple, e.g. the often used Levinson-Durbin algorithm is just 22 lines of C code. It is an interesting exercise to build your own vocoder from scratch that fits in a single screen page.
Many of the code snippets I have seen (which likely have already processed your voice) are just translations of the Fortran code of the book "Linear Prediction of Speech" by Markel and Gray (1976).
The shape of the filters, the smoothing between the filters and the synthesis section, and (on some models) the patchability all create a very different result.
The reason the best analog vocoders are so expensive is because the filter for each band is much more complex than a plain old bandpass filter, with a much higher component count. Typically there's a flatter passband and a steeper slope than you'd expect.
You can do digital convolution with thousands of bins and it sounds nothing like analog vocoding. It's much cleaner, doesn't have those lovely harmonically spaced filter resonances, and creates sounds that can feel more acoustic than electronic.
I was surprised about how much better the Sennheiser sounds compared to the others. From the audio comparison in the first YouTube video. I did expect minor variations in the harmonics but the differences are quite significant between the models.
The other vocoder that sound almost as good is quite new and it seems to still be a prototype with a "contact us" price.
I can’t speak on Dromedary Modular’s behalf and I think rising parts costs have been an issue, but buying an Ultimate VoIS should be a fair bit cheaper than the Moog vocoder.
Above all, the biggest help from his father was probably to insist that they keep the ownership of their music when signing with any label, regardless of any money, because as a producer he knew that this is how artists get screwed by record labels.
As for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: It’s difficult to know for sure without comments from Daft Punk themselves, but the DigiTech Talker has such a unique, throaty sound, and it’s all over the Human After All album. My confidence varies with my guesses, but Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is one of the more confident ones, given how distinctive the Talker is. They also used so much DigiTech gear, especially on that album.
Hopefully they’ll see the article and let me know which bits are wrong.
128 bands, band redistribution, ability to further route using patcher, just look at its manual to see :)
Though its shrouded by the standard "FL is for rap dumb dumb" stigma. Marketing is one hell of a drug.
(Note that the XILS 201 plugin requires iLok. I think iLok sucks.)
Thanks. :)