Heavy Metal 'growling' vocoder

Calimaw's icon

Hi guys,

New to the forum, and getting familiar with MAX again.

I am curious about FFTs and how I can use it (or others) to produce a 'growling' effect akin to what a heavy metal singer is able to.

I have played around with a few things and what I have come up with is to use a noise signal to modulate an incoming signal to produce a fairly gruff sounding effect.

This effect is not close enough to the result of a heavy metal growl as I would like it to be.

I'm new to using FFT, I don't quite understand how to make sense of the values, or what arguments it takes.

If some one with the a bit of generosity that doesn't have a zero-sum personality would be willing to help I would greatly appreciate it.

Please feel free to ask me to give more details if there is any question about what I am trying to accomplish! :)

commathe's icon

Have you tried using other signals other than noise? What about "growly" sounds? Motor bike engine perhaps? A short sample of someone downing the growling you want to emulate?

Calimaw's icon

Hi Commanthe,

Yes I have actually used a seamless loop of a person who can growl quite well as the modulator and as you may expect it sounds precisely like the noise signal modulation with the addition of a bandpass (due to the human formant).

Growling is by nature a chaotic signal with high dynamic range, which is precisely what noise is.

The information I seek is perhaps similar to a lot of other FFT vocoders that take many steps in producing their intended result.

I am looking to expand my knowledge of using FFT to vocode and looking beyond just the simple multiplication of 2 samples amplitudes to produce an effect.

I need more information on how one signal can be used to modify another in either the frequency domain or amplitude domain (or ways to combine them differently)