Voice Changing Microphone

[MartinKaplan]

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I might be able to purchase one? I am looking for one that is handheld and can be connected to the sound board in a theater. Thanks in advance for your help.

-Marty

[mrgoat]

Could use garageband on an iPad, just need a little dongle to plug a mic in.

[Tom Moore]

You're looking for a microphone with "built in" voice changing gizmo - nothing exists on the professional spectrum to do this; it's just not the way it's done.

There's 1001 gadgets you can plug in between your microphone and the sound system to change the voice but none of these are designed to be operated by someone on stage holding the microphone; it's generally accepted you'd have a sound technician / operator to turn such a gizmo on and off. There are a few semi-pro systems designed for one-man-band singers where vocal changes (distortions, echos and other effects) can be pre-programmed and triggered to turn on/off but these systems generally concern themselves with singing effects (ie a nice echo) and are typically midi based and thus tied to the musical soundtrack or some other timecode.

You need to start by defining precisely what "effect" you want to achieve, that will then give you a range of boxes that can do it. From this you can shortlist the ones that have remote triggering and from that you can work out precisely what sort of remote control gadget you'll need to almost certainly have made in order to trigger it yourself from onstage. It's not going to be cheap.

[Jonathan Townsend]

Is this one of those MIDI box and foot-peddle programming type projects?
IIRC this gets into the same challenges as lighting cues.

[Brad Henderson]

I know performers who have used a foot pedal to control voice changes. No idea how that pedal interacts and with what, but I know that has worked for some

[Steve Bryant]

There are some pretty funny examples if you google Voice Changing Microphone. In one (on YouTube) as the voice gets lower in pitch it also becomes progressively unintelligible, like the carhop mic in American Graffiti.

[NCMarsh]

The most practical approach is to do it as a track and lip sync. Record the lines you need, and using a site like Fiverr, Guru, or Elance hire a sound engineer (quite affordable at high quality via these sources) have it distorted how you want.

N

[MartinKaplan]

I wrote to the magician who uses the voice changer in his show and he kindly provided me with the details. Here is the link to where he bought his specific unit http://cesaral.com/en/see-all/36-cesara ... essor.html Thanks to all of you who responded.

-Marty

[mrgoat]

$450!!!

The Boss unit on it's own sells for around $150.

Nice mark up. Magicians are suckers.

[NCMarsh]

In fairness to Cesar, it appears that he is not just selling the Boss unit, but has modified it to be operated via remote -- I can see that being a cost intensive process both in time and r&d...

[Cesaral Magic]

Right!. Send to me yoru Boss VE-20 and I will adapt it to work with any of my remotes.

Here you can see the remotes:

http://www.cesaral.com/CesaralTransmitters.pdf


Best wishes

Cesar Alonso (Cesaral Magic)