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Chris Wolstenholme Effects

S

slurpy

Mar 31, 2010
144
1
sunshine coast, aus
#1
Before you all started slamming me about the millions of threads already dedicated to this my question is different. I'm not asking about his bass effects, but his vocal effects.

I saw Muse for the second time earlier this year at the Big Day Out festival and during there performance of 'The Resistance' i thought i heard a vocoder being used for Chris' "could be wrong" bits.

I then saw myspaces televised Muse live at SXSW, and i was correct, but not only does the vocoder appear in The Resistance but in Supermassive Black Hole (Glaciers Melting...) and Knights Of Cydonia (No ones going to take me alive...) the thing that struck me as brilliant is in all these parts they've used the vocoder to 'thicken' it. so hes got his live vocal part and his vocoded part blended at the same time (like how a boss ls-2 allows you to blend your clean and distorted bass).

I was curious if anyone knew how this would be done. my initial thought was with 2 mics but Chris only uses 1. So my conclusion is he (and by he i mean his techs) is using a blending unit. but i havnt been able to find a unit that would accomplish this yet (not that I'm actually looking to do this myself, im just a bit of a gear freak so need to know everything). so if anyone knows of what he would or could be using, or your opinions on this then let me know.

also im sorry if this isnt where it should be posted, my thoughts were Chris is a bassist and this is regarding his effects...
 
#2
If you're looking for blended vocoder effects, check out the EHX Voice Box and V256 Vocoder. Both of which can blend effected and clean vocals. I personally own the Voice Box, but am one day going to own the V256 as well. :D

There is also the DigiTech vocoder products, but I am not familiar with them.
 
#6
I was doing FOH for a show a few weeks back at a theatre for an old band from the 70s and the singers used a Voicetone correct pedal. One thing to watch out for is it doesn't seem to be able to take much level, if you sing quietly then its fine but this band had two singers and it was constantly distorting one of them who sings pretty loud, luckily he only did two songs so it wasn't a massive deal but sadly the recordings useless and impossible to fix.

Just to warn you. I've always been off put by them because they only work well when you're slightly missing the pitch, if you miss it by a fair bit then you can hear the pedal working which sounds horrible, my question would be if you are so close to the pitch anyway why not just work on getting it right :) haha
 
#8
My singer has an old Digitech rackmount vocoder which allows you to blend your voice with the vocoder signal. I don't know what model it is, but it's awesome. You can hear it a little bit in 'This Boy Blind' on our Myspace (link in sig). He uses it in the intro, and you can hear it again at about 3.18 (it's also all over the backing vocals on that track, but they're a bit harder to hear).
 

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