My electronic music professor at Berklee College of Music was obsessed with formants. I didn’t actually hear it, but he told me that he once spent two days patching the ARP 2500 to say “Ba-na-na,” on the left speaker, and then the right speaker would respond “Nooo!” Fun stuff. I got to have an hour lab each week where I could work with that big 2500 system. This was on 1973-74. Enjoying your channel!
Haha, bitcrushing a resonant synth is how I stumbled on the yays a few years ago; fabulous video, didn't realize there were *so many* different ways to pull it off!
My first synth was a Nord Wave which has a great vocal filter so these sounds are near and dear to my heart even though I pretty much never use them. Great tutorial! Might have to get some yeeeyaiiiiyoiiii-ing done tonight.
I have bumped into this sound a few times while patching a modular and couldn't figure out exactly what was going on. Thanks for the breakdown of the method. Now I know.
I do have a Teisco S-100P synthesizer (made in 1979 if im correct) and that "little" gorgeous thing have one amazing speciality. A preset called "Voice". Specially for this preset, engineers in Teisco have put into that machine multiple calibrated resonating filters (just for that one preset!) and the outcome is simply astonishing (especially when using aftertouch for vibrato and switching portamento for additional expression). I used that sound as a lead for one of my recent tunes (and generally it is all over my new album) and actually quite a few people (including seasoned producers) thought it was a real human voice singing.
@@AlexBallMusic Actually not at all, it really does sound like human. The tune I used it in as lead is called Mad Maverick - Vintage, easier to show like this than attempting to describe ;-)
@@DestroyER82 @AlexBallMusic The S-100P is my secret weapon, and that voice preset is incredible in the right context. What really makes it is the aftertouch to pitch bend. Brilliant and unnerving sound. Brilliant little synth overall really.
You should check out the C64 chiptune "mr. marvellous", if you haven't heard it before! Some extremely tortuous coding to produce extremely tortured phonemes.
Thanks - finally I know how to make VCF go "yay" :D And besides, this trick of modulating low-tuned resonant filter with high-pitched tone to introduce "aliasing" is brilliant in its own way and opens the doors to many other interesting dirty sounds. Thanks again for showing this!
Funnily enough I have spent a considerable number of hours doing something very similar. It was moderately easy on a sub37 but quite difficult with my triton extreme. It's nice to see someone else do similar stuff. You pulled it off quickly and made it appear easy. Very enjoyable, thank you.
Discovered this. wheeze when I had a Roland SYSTEM-1 for a while. I wasn't completely convinced of its musical worth and I certainly couldn't find a place in my work for it but Alex works his magic wonderfully here to demonstrate its potential.
The is the best. I am always trying to make sounds like this. This is the best tutorial I have ever seen on it and now I finally fully get it. It really helps when people say things like, you can use a low pass but a band pass works best because... It helps me to understand what is the important aspects of the design. A thousand times thank you. I just found the holy grail, quest over. Time to play now. bye.
talking synth, thats well and dandy, but in the moog part you went also in a even more important direction: it seemed to me you were only some tweaks away from making the synth do a cats meow.... as usual: your presentation is phantastic. thanks a lot
Alex , please do a video on emulating animal sounds by vintage analog synths! pleeeeaze! All those seagulls, wild geese, crickets, frogs - we’re waitin’!
I’ll never forget stumbling across this effect on my friend’s brother’s Odyssey - then replicating that on a pawn shop bargain Pro One back in the early 80s. So metallic and magical - never fails to make me smile.
Awesome tutorial! I tried it out on my System-500 first, but had a tough time dialing in the filter used for self-oscillation. I'm now using a ladder filter instead for the S/H clock input and a G-Storm SH-5 clone for the main filter, feeding the main sawtooth into the dedicated bandpass and a bit of sub-osc into the lowpass, then the final audio signal into an expert sleepers persephone VCA with built in JFET distortion. Takes a lot of time to dial in but the result is so cool. Now I just can't touch anything ever again. I've never thought of using S/H for anything other than random voltages with the built in noise for the sampling input. Thanks again!
Technically you don't even need a S&H, an audio rate modulated VCA will do (almost) the same trick. Just in case you don't have an S&H in your system. I'm at around 7 minutes, so you probably will bring that up as well. :D Well, I guess I added some other way to do it. ;) Very cool video! This is the stuff I like. And a great jam at the end to top it all off! Edit: I used a Mother-32 and a DFAM to create a bandpass filter and I used an external env. generator for the DFAM (which I probably wouldn't have needed). Massive YIAOOUS!
I was so surprised to hear the Trident doing this sound at the start of your video. I immediately thought that it sounded like it was run through a sample rate reducer - and exactly that was the case! I produced very similar sounds in my synthesizer demo video of the tiny Hotone KRUSH pedal. I like these sounds as well. YAY!
Funnily enough, I'd actually stuck an oscillator from the 2600 into the filter input on the back of the Trident, so that one was audio rate filter FM. The bit crusher would have done it too though, as you say.
Thanks for this great tutorial and explanation @AlexBallMusic! I was able to get a fairly convincing YEAIE out of my Polybrute and used it in my latest video (gave you a shoutout as well). Cheers!
Very cool. I'm guessing that the reason the S/H or filter modulation brings so much more dimension to the sound is that they cause aliasing that adds a lot of higher frequency content that looks like additional formants moving around.
I remember us discussing this a while back on the System 500 modules from Roland, good fun! Love the YEI or YOI ... petition to just call it gob hole! haha
Ive been a synth nerd for 20 years now, but somehow till this day s&h has been always the "make barbarella computer bleepidy-bloop" random function. For a video thats supposed to teach a synth go IYAAII these few minutes have been a paradigm-shift for me.
Right! Yeah, it always annoys me that hardwired versions of sample and hold circuits and ring modulators or vocoders have fixed connectivity and functionality and so get totally misunderstood. They are totally open ended and can do so many things.
@@AlexBallMusicExactly! Like even for more traditional S+H duties, there's more than just random/sampling noise. Sending in triangle or saw waves (making stepped versions of them) can be really cool. Some vintage Roland synths had this option, I think. But unfortunately, it's not very common on modern stuff outside of semi/modular. Hell, I don't think any synths I have at the moment can do that.
One of my university lecturers said that you should never forget that your voice is the most versatile and powerful instrument you have in your studio and it always stuck with me. So obvious, but we get distracted by technology.
So fun! I first discovered this with my Akai S3200XL - I think I'd sampled a pattern from a 303 and then went to the FX section to process it. The S3200XL had a frequency modulator, which if set correctly gives virtually the same effect as the Sample + Hold technique here. I was like "Oh, THAT's how you make that sound" lol I think the first time I ever heard it was either on the track 'Fly Street' by Squarepusher, or 'Shiz Ko E' by The Tuss (aka; Aphex Twin). Both tracks rinse this technique.
@@AlexBallMusic I think the FX board is called the EB16, it came as standard on the 3200XL but could be bought seperately and put inside any 3000 unit and even the MPC2000! If you ever get the chance to do so, please have a play around with one! It had an unusual selection of effects and modulation options, like cascading pitched delays and reverbs (a la Eventide H3000), the aforementioned frequency shifter and my favourite of all was an EQ with a dual LFO's for the peak frequencies and gain...just barmy stuff, you could very quickly get into headfuq IDM territory lol. It's been a while, but I seem to remember it being dual channel too, one for anything and one exclusively for reverb. I cannot think of any other hardware FX unit off the top of my head that could do all of those things, besides an Eventide system that's 100% user programmable with the only limit being memory...but alas, nobody EVER seems to talk about them!
I got pretty close with the (effectively) twin-peak band-pass on the Super 6 but I didn't think about routing it into the S&H. Definitely fun things to try. (I hope the S&H in there isn't stuck doing the R2D2 noise, I hope it's in the mod matrix!) I've mostly been doing this with FM, which is quite easy to make distinct wow and yai and wee sounds in a distinct and very repeatable way. But some of the variance in these other methods gives them a more "alive" quality despite sounding more synthetic in other ways. I like it!
Nice one Alex, even like your student coloured carpet. Lets face it who wants to spend money on fancy carpet when you can buy a synth or two . Noice. Another spiffingly good video tutorial Many thanks. .
I’m y’id out! Very cool seeing the different ways to do this. I was mostly familiar with second way, but didn’t quite get the theory behind it. That helps a lot…
Great video buddy! So as I understand it, by bitcrushing with a S&H, you lower the sample rate and create sidebands at fixed high frequencies.. These are what you're emulating with the fast oscillator, which represent the high-frequency overtones in a resonant cavity like a mouth.. X
The first thing I did when learning phonetics was to dig out my DX7 and choose the #32 parallell patch and dial in the sine waves according to my newfound knowledge of formants. Later on I married a professor of phonetics and evolved (a bit).
Good vid, fun sounds and a nice track at the end. I popped my cherry on this sound with my Norand Mono a couple of days ago, I was well chuffed I got it to talk, does a good job of it.
@@AlexBallMusic Yeah, I like it. It can be a simple little acid box or you can dive deep with all the modulation and stuff. It does a lot and has it's own sound. I generally have it plugged into my TR8S, they're a fun pair.
Nice tutorial! You can get that vocal quality with a ring modulator as well. Or two resonant filters with cutoff sweeping in opposite directions. These methods will not have the crunch factor, though.
Just like with the unicorns, there should be "Yoie" tunes 😜
Best synthesizer channel on UA-cam.
100%
I enjoy your quirky mix of wit, weirdness and science. Job well done.
My electronic music professor at Berklee College of Music was obsessed with formants. I didn’t actually hear it, but he told me that he once spent two days patching the ARP 2500 to say “Ba-na-na,” on the left speaker, and then the right speaker would respond “Nooo!” Fun stuff. I got to have an hour lab each week where I could work with that big 2500 system. This was on 1973-74. Enjoying your channel!
You can get a much wider vocabulary on FM synths, but then they start talking sh*t about you behind your back...
😂
Bananas wow wow
True story.
Bananarama “WOW!” and Bow Wow Wow were two different bands and projects.
This is like watching a wizard create a spell. Amazing
Haha, bitcrushing a resonant synth is how I stumbled on the yays a few years ago; fabulous video, didn't realize there were *so many* different ways to pull it off!
Yeah, I keep stumbling on the same result from different routes, so I thought I'd share them all. 😀
@@AlexBallMusic It's greatly-appreciated, like I'm genuinely tempted to explore S&H and LFOs in these new ways: thank you ❤
Fantastic! Thanks for turning a clip on social media into a full tutorial.
After about the 40th request, I relented.
Hopefully the world will be full of yeeeiiiis from now on.
A video talking about synths that talk back. Yay! Wow!
SYNTHESYAAAAIIIIZERS!!! Lovely tutorial. I'm gonna have some fun with this over the weekend!
My first synth was a Nord Wave which has a great vocal filter so these sounds are near and dear to my heart even though I pretty much never use them. Great tutorial! Might have to get some yeeeyaiiiiyoiiii-ing done tonight.
i'm looping that outro jam over and over. I really like that type of thing.
Clear explanations and... like always, amazing music in the end ! Alex is the best !
Great tutorial 🙏 you can get also some nice talking sounds like "eiiiii" and "jaaaa" with the resonant waves of a Casio CZ.
Polyphonic Ya were brilliant back in the day. Their set at Reading Festival is legendary.
Neeeeiiiiiiight and day
I have never heard of them and google comes up with nothing - is this some kind of inside joke? 😅
@@mbrombert thepolyphonicspree.com/
I have bumped into this sound a few times while patching a modular and couldn't figure out exactly what was going on. Thanks for the breakdown of the method. Now I know.
You given the new york school of synthesis a run for their money on this one Alex! Fuggin Wow!
I do have a Teisco S-100P synthesizer (made in 1979 if im correct) and that "little" gorgeous thing have one amazing speciality. A preset called "Voice". Specially for this preset, engineers in Teisco have put into that machine multiple calibrated resonating filters (just for that one preset!) and the outcome is simply astonishing (especially when using aftertouch for vibrato and switching portamento for additional expression). I used that sound as a lead for one of my recent tunes (and generally it is all over my new album) and actually quite a few people (including seasoned producers) thought it was a real human voice singing.
Oh cool! A bit like Vox Humana, I guess? I didn't know that about the S100-P.
@@AlexBallMusic Actually not at all, it really does sound like human. The tune I used it in as lead is called Mad Maverick - Vintage, easier to show like this than attempting to describe ;-)
ua-cam.com/video/O0zwiJA-E0I/v-deo.htmlsi=VkKd8uZlOJtfIEs1
@@DestroyER82 @AlexBallMusic The S-100P is my secret weapon, and that voice preset is incredible in the right context. What really makes it is the aftertouch to pitch bend. Brilliant and unnerving sound. Brilliant little synth overall really.
Jeepers! That's an amazing present. Now I need an S-100P!
You are a total legend Alex. I love your channel as a total synth nerd. Go bro ❤
You should check out the C64 chiptune "mr. marvellous", if you haven't heard it before! Some extremely tortuous coding to produce extremely tortured phonemes.
Thanks - finally I know how to make VCF go "yay" :D And besides, this trick of modulating low-tuned resonant filter with high-pitched tone to introduce "aliasing" is brilliant in its own way and opens the doors to many other interesting dirty sounds. Thanks again for showing this!
Funnily enough I have spent a considerable number of hours doing something very similar. It was moderately easy on a sub37 but quite difficult with my triton extreme. It's nice to see someone else do similar stuff. You pulled it off quickly and made it appear easy. Very enjoyable, thank you.
Yeah. Got it from my sub 37 in the past too. Brought in with modwheel. #happyaccident.
This is a preset on the Novation Mininova and Ultranova.
Discovered this. wheeze when I had a Roland SYSTEM-1 for a while.
I wasn't completely convinced of its musical worth and I certainly couldn't find a place in my work for it but Alex works his magic wonderfully here to demonstrate its potential.
The is the best. I am always trying to make sounds like this. This is the best tutorial I have ever seen on it and now I finally fully get it. It really helps when people say things like, you can use a low pass but a band pass works best because... It helps me to understand what is the important aspects of the design. A thousand times thank you. I just found the holy grail, quest over. Time to play now. bye.
Cheers! Glad it was useful.
Thanks - I know quite a few synth tricks but I'd never got around to finding out how this one was done. I appreciate the tutorial!
Always a treat, Alex. Thanks again, buddy.
I think I'll probably do it in VCV Rack. You can do almost anything in VCV. Nice end jam.
As always from Alex: a well thought-out, thoroughly entertaining demonstration!
Cheers Howard!
talking synth, thats well and dandy, but in the moog part you went also in a even more important direction: it seemed to me you were only some tweaks away from making the synth do a cats meow.... as usual: your presentation is phantastic. thanks a lot
Alex , please do a video on emulating animal sounds by vintage analog synths! pleeeeaze! All those seagulls, wild geese, crickets, frogs - we’re waitin’!
I love the track you made. Thanks for the video!
Very cool! Always appreciate your videos.
👍The yay-yay song at the end was fun. The first part I already knew from an earlier 100m patch video of yours. Thanks.
Thank you! I spent all night finding ways to make yays with my particular setup!
Alex von Kempelen k. k. wirklichen Hofraths Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst der Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine
Love it 😊
One great way I’ve found to emphasize the vocal quality is to send it to a slightly detuned frequency shifter with significant feedback set up.
WOW! great variety of examples there Alex
I’ll never forget stumbling across this effect on my friend’s brother’s Odyssey - then replicating that on a pawn shop bargain Pro One back in the early 80s. So metallic and magical - never fails to make me smile.
Very interesting tutorial! It also randomly reminded me of the vowel filter in a tc electronic Fireworx…
Thank you!!! this is by far my favorite Alex Ball synth signature dude you're a fucking genius
Awesome tutorial! I tried it out on my System-500 first, but had a tough time dialing in the filter used for self-oscillation. I'm now using a ladder filter instead for the S/H clock input and a G-Storm SH-5 clone for the main filter, feeding the main sawtooth into the dedicated bandpass and a bit of sub-osc into the lowpass, then the final audio signal into an expert sleepers persephone VCA with built in JFET distortion. Takes a lot of time to dial in but the result is so cool. Now I just can't touch anything ever again. I've never thought of using S/H for anything other than random voltages with the built in noise for the sampling input. Thanks again!
Technically you don't even need a S&H, an audio rate modulated VCA will do (almost) the same trick. Just in case you don't have an S&H in your system. I'm at around 7 minutes, so you probably will bring that up as well. :D
Well, I guess I added some other way to do it. ;) Very cool video! This is the stuff I like. And a great jam at the end to top it all off!
Edit: I used a Mother-32 and a DFAM to create a bandpass filter and I used an external env. generator for the DFAM (which I probably wouldn't have needed). Massive YIAOOUS!
This was really interesting and helpful. Excellent video, like always. Thank you!
You make it look easy. Superb sounds.
Thanks, Alex - I'll try to do similar on my Kyma system now you've given a great explanation.
Very good Alex, thanks! I only knew the bitcrusher method but I will surely try out the others as well!
It's ALIIIIIIIIVE!
(hits it with bat)
Enjoyable and informative as always, loved the Throbbing Gristle-esque end track (well reminded me of them)
This has turned out to be providing lots of fun trying to get some better sounds out of miRack and VCV Rack. Thanks again for a great tutorial.
- better than my first patches working with this concept.
I feel like one could go completely insane in your studio.
Really nice, universal demo! Thanks for sharing!
Superb, Sir!
I was so surprised to hear the Trident doing this sound at the start of your video. I immediately thought that it sounded like it was run through a sample rate reducer - and exactly that was the case! I produced very similar sounds in my synthesizer demo video of the tiny Hotone KRUSH pedal. I like these sounds as well. YAY!
Funnily enough, I'd actually stuck an oscillator from the 2600 into the filter input on the back of the Trident, so that one was audio rate filter FM. The bit crusher would have done it too though, as you say.
@@AlexBallMusic Ah, neat trick! I could try that with my Trident and my MS-50.
@@PepeMusic That'll do it, yep!
Outro jam becomes top track of 2024 electro chart..
Hell yeah! I love the sound of talking machines.
Yeah, I had a lot of fun with the dedicated formant filter on the Hydrasynth in particular. Love those weird voices.
Thanks for clearing this up! I always thought it was some kind of demon in my SH-101.
Thanks for this great tutorial and explanation @AlexBallMusic! I was able to get a fairly convincing YEAIE out of my Polybrute and used it in my latest video (gave you a shoutout as well). Cheers!
Shades of Tomita’s “talking/singing” synth work during the into to “The Planets” album. Great stuff!
Very cool. I'm guessing that the reason the S/H or filter modulation brings so much more dimension to the sound is that they cause aliasing that adds a lot of higher frequency content that looks like additional formants moving around.
What a great idea that fast mod is! Thanks for the tip[!
I remember us discussing this a while back on the System 500 modules from Roland, good fun! Love the YEI or YOI ... petition to just call it gob hole! haha
Yay yay yay... very nice and inspiring! 🙂Thanks, Alex!
Yeah, I wondered how this kept happening to me, lol. Thanks for the video. You do fantastic work :).
I immediately bought three 1047's when the price dropped a little while ago so I could bandpass filter for F1, F2, and F3
One of favorite sounds
Thanks Alex, this is fun stuff!
Ah yes, the good old YOI bass... a must have in any heavy bass producer's tool belt.
Such a fun topic and greatly explained! I need to try this on my behringer neutron asap!
Ive been a synth nerd for 20 years now, but somehow till this day s&h has been always the "make barbarella computer bleepidy-bloop" random function.
For a video thats supposed to teach a synth go IYAAII these few minutes have been a paradigm-shift for me.
Right! Yeah, it always annoys me that hardwired versions of sample and hold circuits and ring modulators or vocoders have fixed connectivity and functionality and so get totally misunderstood. They are totally open ended and can do so many things.
@@AlexBallMusicExactly! Like even for more traditional S+H duties, there's more than just random/sampling noise. Sending in triangle or saw waves (making stepped versions of them) can be really cool. Some vintage Roland synths had this option, I think. But unfortunately, it's not very common on modern stuff outside of semi/modular. Hell, I don't think any synths I have at the moment can do that.
Listening to your song Nexus, I always thought it was vocoder shenanigans. Thank you for your well explained video.
Just watching you kneeling amongst your synths like a kid surrounded by a sea of unwrapped presents on Christmas morning….makes my knees ache
This is how the WAVE channel of LSDJ sounds like with high resonance, because it's a 4-bit synth
Have you ever thought of yourself as a very advanced sound synthesizer?
You can really do some insane sound design with the human body! ! !
One of my university lecturers said that you should never forget that your voice is the most versatile and powerful instrument you have in your studio and it always stuck with me. So obvious, but we get distracted by technology.
Loving your work, sir.
I never get tired of yai, ayy, or yows
So fun! I first discovered this with my Akai S3200XL - I think I'd sampled a pattern from a 303 and then went to the FX section to process it. The S3200XL had a frequency modulator, which if set correctly gives virtually the same effect as the Sample + Hold technique here. I was like "Oh, THAT's how you make that sound" lol
I think the first time I ever heard it was either on the track 'Fly Street' by Squarepusher, or 'Shiz Ko E' by The Tuss (aka; Aphex Twin). Both tracks rinse this technique.
Ah cool, I didn't know you could do that with Akai samplers!
@@AlexBallMusic I think the FX board is called the EB16, it came as standard on the 3200XL but could be bought seperately and put inside any 3000 unit and even the MPC2000! If you ever get the chance to do so, please have a play around with one!
It had an unusual selection of effects and modulation options, like cascading pitched delays and reverbs (a la Eventide H3000), the aforementioned frequency shifter and my favourite of all was an EQ with a dual LFO's for the peak frequencies and gain...just barmy stuff, you could very quickly get into headfuq IDM territory lol.
It's been a while, but I seem to remember it being dual channel too, one for anything and one exclusively for reverb. I cannot think of any other hardware FX unit off the top of my head that could do all of those things, besides an Eventide system that's 100% user programmable with the only limit being memory...but alas, nobody EVER seems to talk about them!
It's very enthusiastic
I use that with the LFO and modulation on my Behringer MS-1. Very fun!
I got pretty close with the (effectively) twin-peak band-pass on the Super 6 but I didn't think about routing it into the S&H. Definitely fun things to try. (I hope the S&H in there isn't stuck doing the R2D2 noise, I hope it's in the mod matrix!)
I've mostly been doing this with FM, which is quite easy to make distinct wow and yai and wee sounds in a distinct and very repeatable way. But some of the variance in these other methods gives them a more "alive" quality despite sounding more synthetic in other ways. I like it!
Great tutorial! Thanks for all the fish!
Nice one Alex, even like your student coloured carpet. Lets face it who wants to spend money on fancy carpet when you can buy a synth or two . Noice. Another spiffingly good video tutorial Many thanks. .
I’m y’id out! Very cool seeing the different ways to do this. I was mostly familiar with second way, but didn’t quite get the theory behind it. That helps a lot…
I've started using my old E-mu esi32 again after not using it for years. The Turbo expansion fx card has a bunch of really cool vowel formant filters.
Amazing vid, Thank you! Always wondered how it was done. See you are a Roland fan... Nice...
Glad I'm not the only one who likes to show off that a Minimoog has a lot more range than most people tend to think.
Indeed it does! The rear filter input is often an overlooked feature too.
I'm sure changing the way the envelope modulates the filter can give you an Ohoowo sound!
Just built this patch in my Eurorack. So awesome 😅👍!
0:05 damn that’s almost the “Protect and Survive” tone
Great! More of this kind of videos please!
That outro kicked serious ass!
I’m never going to do this so I am so happy you did.
Great video buddy!
So as I understand it, by bitcrushing with a S&H, you lower the sample rate and create sidebands at fixed high frequencies..
These are what you're emulating with the fast oscillator, which represent the high-frequency overtones in a resonant cavity like a mouth.. X
Track at the end is insane
The first thing I did when learning phonetics was to dig out my DX7 and choose the #32 parallell patch and dial in the sine waves according to my newfound knowledge of formants. Later on I married a professor of phonetics and evolved (a bit).
Thanks Alex! Been working on this for weeks...
Good vid, fun sounds and a nice track at the end.
I popped my cherry on this sound with my Norand Mono a couple of days ago, I was well chuffed I got it to talk, does a good job of it.
Excellent. I've never tried a Norand. Are you enjoying it?
@@AlexBallMusic Yeah, I like it. It can be a simple little acid box or you can dive deep with all the modulation and stuff. It does a lot and has it's own sound. I generally have it plugged into my TR8S, they're a fun pair.
My heart is over-yay-ed
🫵
Fantastic tutorial Eyei Eyei Eyei……..
Nice tutorial! You can get that vocal quality with a ring modulator as well. Or two resonant filters with cutoff sweeping in opposite directions. These methods will not have the crunch factor, though.
Yo, the end Jam on this one was especially Heavy!