"Metallic" and distorted vocals in Front Line Assembly

[RandolphCarter]

I love how FLA for their vocals to sound so harsh and metallic in many tracks but I'm especially fascinated with two examples:

The first is "Victim", when the chorus kicks in, the vocals sound sort of metallic (1:50 mark)

https://youtu.be/d6DcS6DoJUU

Then in Mindphaser I love all the vocals but specifically, when the outro comes, they sound harsh, distorted and amazing (4:20 mark).

https://youtu.be/0bRZgDwdcZs

Any ideas on how to get vocals sounding like that? Effects, plugins, techniques...

[GearNostalgia]

Don't know, but if I remember correctly at that time they were using samplers like K2000 and the may very well have pitched it down and send it through som filters, possibly adding distortion. They are both active on facebook, they may answer you if you ask them.

[MutantHero]

Bill himself has alluded to the use of Eventide processing. He has shifted the spotlight on those questions off himself to a producer (not Rhys) claiming that person is a genius and will spend hours tweaking it (Eventide). I say it's him though. You can't give away all your secrets and at the same time you cant piss people off. I myself have heard more than once, a mix of natural vocal, and octave down, and the octave down having been harmonically modified. Lots of times a vocoder is in the mix. I have also heard two takes at times played together. I would not be surprised if a single vocal take sometimes occupy 3,4 or 5 tracks or more. Anyway yeah it's something I have been fascinated with too. It's definitely a trademark with him. I myself in my opinion think the mix includes in any order and combination: vocoding, pitch shifting, excitation, and distortion / saturation. I think sometimes the vocal is split or duplicated, and all these processes happen in parallel, and then they're mixed back together to get the desired effect or good effect at least.

[MutantHero]

I think the biggest wildcard though is what audio is the carrier of the vocoder.

[SeePlusPlus]

ask Ken, he knows stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tmvtcrfp7s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vhGHPvX2ag
etc.

[Benedict]

A lot of that is vocal production as you can hear his throat. It is a bit rough on the old pipes, I know as I used to do it in my Aeroplastic Voice days.

My fave method back then was a terrible mic (sometimes a $30 thing, others one form a telephone), driving the desk input (particularly the Alesis 1622) and then Flangers.

[empphryio]

ask Ken, he knows stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tmvtcrfp7s

I was so excited I was going to get the details after wondering for 15 years. ...and it's from their worse album with his worst sounding vocals.

Flanger and a great natural cookie monster voice is the best i know of. Other than mixing in some degree of vocoder.

[Danno]

Bringing this thread back because I've been thinking about the same thing. I like the white noise vocoder idea. I should give that a try. I think layering in the vocoder and some l/r microshift would get you fairly close.
Ultimately the sound is Bill's voice though, isn't it...

I'm working on a similar sound right now.. I feel silly recording this kind of vocal but in the track, it's not terrible.

(edit.. also I'm not bothering with a decent mic. I've just got an AudioTech 57 copy sitting on the desk next to me. If anything, the reduced top end on this mic helps when I'm crushing it after)

[Ah_Dziz]

The eventide and tc electronic stuff was doing some great reverb and pitch manipulation algorithms in their multi FX processors. Back then people were still doing lots of heavy mixing editing and processing in decent sized commercial studios that had a good pile of nice gear so it was more a creative use of the tools of the time that gave them their sounds. One thing I found for getting the "classic" industrial vocal sound right was that the distortions in those processors back then were not trying to emulate actual amps and were made mainly for sound design purposes. So a nice gate into a full on digital waveshaper into an eq and then Into a big reverb send can get you there or close. Another trick was recording the source vocal at higher speeds to drop the vocal formant when it was played at the regular speed. There was lots of resampling of vocals with emu and ensoniq samplers that had some fun filters and offline processing like time stretching or convolution. This is just based off of my early years of production when lots of folks I knew were big into the "industrial sound".

[SeePlusPlus]