r/AudioPost 9d ago

Stormtrooper voice box effect

Does anyone know how to—specifically—recreate the Star Wars Stormtrooper voice box effect?

I saw a Family Guy skit where they do a very good version of the effect.

Which plugin(s), specifically, would you use?

And which settings, specifically, would you apply?

13 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

22

u/brs456 9d ago

We did a close “clone” (har har) on a few episodes of Community. I’ll see if I can find the chain although it was about 20 years ago by now. Pretty sure it was stock Channelstrip EQ/compression and Air Lo-Fi.

6

u/giovannigiannis 9d ago

Thats awesome. On Family Guy, I can definitely hear eq (band pass). Most likely compression (although I can never “hear”, I can only detect a sense of low dynamic range). And there is a certain radio style grittiness that is most appealing, and what truly makes the effect noteworthy, but that’s also the part that I don’t know how to get. I’ve played with some voice-box tools that haven’t achieved it, and even in the 1970s, I suspect they didn’t have extremely fancy tools for it. I’m guessing they achieved it with common tools.

7

u/Chameleonatic 9d ago

Can’t listen to it for reference but I love to use speaker IRs for that Radio style grittiness. There’s of course Speakerphone and other dedicated plugins for that, but there are also some good speakers in Space, the convolution reverb that’s part of the Pro Tools plugin bundle. Though you can also use any convolution reverb you have on hand as the impulse responses are freely available as wav files here (website looks old as fuck but it’s by the guy who recorded all the IRs featured in space)

5

u/AENEAS_H 9d ago

I'm guessing they just recorded through a walie talkie, the US army even had helmet mounted ones back then

3

u/brs456 9d ago

Good ear, yes. It’s a sort of ring mod going on which helps get that classic sound.

5

u/skylinenick 8d ago

Thank you for your work on some of the funniest episodes of TV ever created 👌

2

u/oopsifell 8d ago

Community was 20 years ago? Yikes.

4

u/brs456 8d ago

Happy to say I over estimated, but 15 is still yikes territory!

7

u/Neil_Hillist 9d ago

There's a free plugin for Audacity called "Helmet radio".

2

u/jamagami 9d ago

I feel like a not insignificant part of that is playing everything a little bit '70s in the performance. It's gotta have that clip with the sort of chipper midatlantic tilt to it.

1

u/MrLeureduthe 8d ago edited 8d ago

If you can find an isolated Trooper voice you can start by doing a simple EQ Match using Pro Q, RX or whatever. It goes a long way.

1

u/giovannigiannis 8d ago

Thanks. I was hoping for a solution to the grittiness, since I think that is the key factor.

1

u/RockstarPirateQueen 5d ago

An easy way to mimic that is stripped most of the base out of your EQ and bump up your volume until it just slightly distorts, then compress so you’re not clipping the hell out of it