Rocky Mountain Wayward

some autowah (envelope follower) pedals will do this. my Digitech autowah has a vocal setting. the adjustments change the filtering for the two extremes, creating two different vowel sounds.

The original used a talk box.

even tho he wrote vocoder, I'm guessing he meant talk box -- which can be a real PITA to set up and use well.

even tho he wrote vocoder, I'm guessing he meant talk box -- which can be a real PITA to set up and use well.

Once again I mis-use a term, though I think I was repeating someone else's error. According to Wiki, a vocoder is a system where voice input is converted to other electrical signals (amplitude and phase) using an envelope follower and other circuits, transmitted, and then re-formed as a voice output. As I see it, a talk box does the second part, attempting to re-create a voice using the guitar for frequency and tone, and the singer's mouth for "shape".

In any case, I was looking for a way to get my guitarist to sound like Joe Walsh (or Peter Frampton), without any hoses. We'll see if his pedal board has the right combination of toys.

We're looking to add this song to our blues list, and I was wondering what combination of EFX would be best to simulate the vocoder sound, without the vocoder. Some combination of distortion, flanger, auto-wah, chorus...? Or we could just have our drummer "sing" it...

I never worried about it. Just crank up the gain, bend 'em tight and let 'em scream.

a talk box is more akin to an artificial larynx. the wet 'n' sticky parts are the filter instead of the modulating signal source.

but anyway ... auto-wah aside, I get the most manual articulation with whammy bar and a plain ole wahwahwah pedal on edge of crunchy OD, so the sound goes from cleanish to a bit raunchy with playing dynamics. requires more work than an auto-wah, but with some practice, it's possible to get some very interesting human-to-animal sounds. Joe Walsh is somewhere on that continuum.