Talking Bass

Wout Blommers

No, not a walking bass, but a talking bass...

I will try to get somebody in Frankfurt interested, next month Wink

My son tried to play the double bass using a tie-rap. Then I remembered something like talking balloons ever existed: a blown balloon to which a tie-rap like cord was attached, which grooves told you "Happy Birthday" when scratched by a finger nail, using the balloon as a resonator.
Is there a possibility to make something like that to a bow? Replace able? How to convert a wav file into a stripped piece of plastic?

Is this done before?

Wout

Inventor · Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2009 4:28 am Post subject:

Well that is a cool idea to make a guitar talk with some encoded pick-like object. The way I've done it is with ChucK. The attached audio sample was made by combining my voice with my guitar.

The way it works is you somehow determine the frequency spectrum of the voice, then apply that to the guitar's sound as an effect. Works pretty good.

VocalMixFrampton1.mp3

Description:

Filesize:

171.43 KB

Viewed:

1759 Time(s)

Wout Blommers · Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2009 5:39 am Post subject:

Sounds interesting, but just in case, is this spoken words or something else and maybe you can tell what the words, if any, are Smile

Wout

Inventor · Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2009 6:15 am Post subject:

It is spoken word mixed with guitar. The words are "Do you feel like I do?" just like in the famous Peter Frampton talkbox recording.

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

I'm not entirely sure I understand, Wout, but slightly OT, Larry Graham made some really nice sounds with a bass guitar through a talk-box back in the early 70s, right after he quit Sly And The Family Stone. I've got the Graham Central Station album "Now Do U Want 2 Dance?" and the title cut is a wicked funk groove with some talk-box lead bass taking the lead singer's job.

DES · Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 7:53 pm Post subject:

I was going thru some of the older threads and thought I would add my own experience here.... Smile

Years ago - ~1982 - I was really hooked on the vocoder sound. But, being young, married with a young child there was no way I could afford a vocoder. However, the talk boxes were pretty popular with guitarists and I thought - maybe I could run my minimoog through one of those and get that vocoder effect. Well, a new talk box was out of the question but I did have my bass amp and an electro-voice 1" horn driver. So, I took a rubber solder-sucker bulb, cut it in half and used a hose clamp to attach it to the driver, attached a rubber hose to the nozzle end of the solder sucker and ran the hose up to my mic. I connected my bass head - 300 watt Peavey bass head - to the driver. Plugged the minimoog in and started playing. Wow did it sound good! I was using a string patch and decided to do a talking bass test. At first it went great...

Then I made the mistake of letting my mouth close around the tube while a note was sounding.....about turned my brain into jello from the sound pressure!! Shocked

I did use it several times after that but made sure I never made that mistake again....

Inventor · Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 11:33 pm Post subject:

Oh man, I didn't quite understand your setup, but it certainly would be inadvisable to hook up a 300 Watt thing to your mouth in any way, shape, or form! Glad you survived without any apparent damage, heh.

DES · Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 12:00 pm Post subject:

Well, electrically speaking I was isolated from the amp. Sonically though....

A basic talk box is: Instrument => Amp => Driver =>thru rubber tube => Mouth => Mic.

Drivers used typically are re-purposed HF horn drivers - 1" +/- throat. Most people (back then me as well) don't realize how much pressure can be generated by a horn driver into a small enclosure. I mean you think 'ok a 1" spekaer - how loud can that be...?' Also, a lot of drivers are only rated 30 to 100 watts.

Well, they can generate a lot of sound pressure in a confined space! What I decided to do later on in my experiments was to use small HiFi midrange horn drivers (available from Radio Shack and others) and drive them with a small 15 watt amp. Work great - and in general last a good while as long as you don't let moisture collect in the driver. PAiA used to have a kit where they took a plastic disc (like th eplastic lid to a coffee can) and would put a small plastic pipe through the center of it and then mount the whole thing to the front of their small Pignose style amplifier - worked really well...