hello everybody, I just joined this forum. I love shpongle.
I have a question concerning their samples of spoken words that they use sometimes. I’m a musician myself , very interested in this kind of thing, but coming more from the acoustic side of music, so I don’t have any experience with it.
I know steve reich used his samples of spoken words in “different trains” without changing their pitch (“as they spoke, so I wrote”). the spoken words in shpongle’s works (I’m thinking especially about the “nothing lasts…”-cd) are very “processed”, use a lot of effects to make them fit to the music - which they do fantastically. does anybody know how they do it? what kind of effects do they use? do they alter the pitch? “melodine” maybe (or what’s the program’s name?)
your help is very appreciated!

jazz from hell

Each spoken word sample from Shpongle is uniquely different.
Why don’t you pick one, and we can try to break it down. 

Welcome to the forums!

jazz from hell - 01 November 2009 07:41 PM

hello everybody, I just joined this forum. I love shpongle.
I have a question concerning their samples of spoken words that they use sometimes. I’m a musician myself , very interested in this kind of thing, but coming more from the acoustic side of music, so I don’t have any experience with it.
I know steve reich used his samples of spoken words in “different trains” without changing their pitch (“as they spoke, so I wrote”). the spoken words in shpongle’s works (I’m thinking especially about the “nothing lasts…”-cd) are very “processed”, use a lot of effects to make them fit to the music - which they do fantastically. does anybody know how they do it? what kind of effects do they use? do they alter the pitch? “melodine” maybe (or what’s the program’s name?)
your help is very appreciated!

jazz from hell

I think somewhere on the forum Simon P mentions the effects tool but god know where it is if you want to look through…

And welcome to the Shponglelator

I know he uses Logic as his base software, and the plug-ins and combinations thereof are endless.

Like the man said in the “prestige”:  “Never show anyone. They’ll beg you and they’ll flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up… you’ll be nothing to them.”

thank you for your responses so far. I haven’t found any posts where simon p talks specifically about his samples of spoken words. cloudwalker, thank you for your invitation, but that’s too specific for me to begin with.

what I’m looking for is something more general. I’m a pianist and composer for *acoustic* instruments, and I’m only just starting to experiment with sampling of spoken words, because I’d like to use them in my music, played by a sampling-keyboard, in a context of acoustic instruments. what I found interesting so far is: dealing with the actual pitch of syllables by changing their speed (I know there are programs that change the pitch but don’t change the formants and don’t change the actual speed, does anybody know something about them?) and time-stretching. (distortion, flanger, reverb etc. of course, but that hasn’t been so interesting to me)

or do you know where I can possibly find some necessary information? like books or web-sites?

sample, resample, stretch, pitchshift etc etc. just alot of work. and a dash of the circuitbent vss-200

It’s not Shpongle, but let’s take Crumblenaut from Younger Brother as a case
I love how it starts as a voice.. so you now it’s a voice.. but then it gets so fucked up.. but you still know it’s a voice.. so you can only imagine what the entity singing something like that must look like, and what it must have been going through… awesome.

In some way it reminds me from the opera singer in the 5th element movie, hehe.

The effects in Crumblenaut is not that hard, melodyne or autotune, and then add some wow/flutter/lfo

The “vocal” happening at 3:13 is a sample put through the circuitbent VSS-200 and then some copy pasting

okay, that was already helpful, so thanks! I may upload some stuff of mine later on to discuss it with the experts in here. in like half a year or so… if I don’t give up the idea…

try running some vocals through a frequency shifter. gives it a shpongley kind of twang to it. Or try a delay with a really short delay time say 1-15ms and lots of feedback on it into a chorus. If you have ableton live its loads of fun messing about with vocals through the grain delay too