Daft Punk have used a wide variety of vocal effects in their songs. A May 2001 interview in Remix magazine provided a rare insight from Daft Punk themselves on the topic.

“People always ask us what vocoder we use, but every one of our vocal tracks uses a different vocoder effect. We have the old Roland one [an SVC-350], Auto-Tune, and a DigiTech Vocalist.”

The quote delivers some vital clues, but it’s incomplete, covering only their first two albums. There’s no mention of using a talk box, despite Around The World almost certainly using one. The quote makes it sound like the DigiTech Vocalist is a vocoder, but it’s not. And for that matter, which DigiTech Vocalist model? There’s around 30 pieces of hardware in DigiTech’s Vocalist series, and quite a few of them were around before Discovery’s release in 2001.

I’ve read comments suggesting the DigiTech Vocalist models with the “EX” suffix are special, but nobody seems to know why, and nobody has published a direct comparison to prove or disprove the theory. I decided to take on the challenge, and run the tests myself. Here’s a fraction of the Vocalist units I ended up buying.

Why are there duplicates of the same model? Why is there a Korg ih in that photo? Before this article gets sidetracked with tests and some honestly quite interesting corporate partnerships, mergers, and lawsuits, here is a list of every Daft Punk album song containing robot-like vocal effects, and my guess on which piece of kit was used for the vocals.

Album	Song	Effects
Homework	WDPK 83.7 FM	Roland SVC-350
Homework	Around The World	Talk box
Homework	Teachers	Ensoniq DP/4+
Homework	Oh Yeah	Ensoniq DP/4+
Discovery	One More Time	Auto-Tune
Discovery	Digital Love	DigiTech Vocalist
Discovery	Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger	DigiTech Talker
Discovery	Something About Us	DigiTech Vocalist
Human After All	Human After All	DigiTech Talker
Human After All	The Prime Time Of Your Life	DigiTech Talker
Human After All	Robot Rock	DigiTech Talker
Human After All	The Brainwasher	Tremolo
Human After All	Television Rules The Nation	DigiTech Talker
Human After All	Technologic	Ensoniq DP/4+
Human After All	Emotion	Roland SVC-350
Random Access Memories	Give Life Back To Music	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	The Game Of Love	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	Within	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	Instant Crush	Auto-Tune and VSM201
Random Access Memories	Lose Yourself To Dance	Talker and VSM201
Random Access Memories	Touch	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	Get Lucky	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	Beyond	Sennheiser VSM201
Random Access Memories	Fragments Of Time	Talk box (synth solo)
Random Access Memories	Doin’ It Right	Sennheiser VSM201

Homework notes (20 January 1997) #

There aren’t many robot vocal effects on Homework, but there is a lot of pitch shifting, likely provided by Daft Punk’s Ensoniq DP/4+, a digital multi-effects units that can do a variety of things. I don’t believe Daft Punk used the vocoder on the Ensoniq DP/4+ for Homework or any of their other albums. The Remix magazine quote says Ensoniq DP/4, but a gear list in another interview says DP/4+. It doesn’t matter which model was used, as the pitch shifting and vocoder sound the same on both units.

Discovery notes (12 March 2001) #

One More Time sounds like Auto-Tune in combination with a Mu-Tron Phasor or Moogerfooger. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger uses a DigiTech Talker vocoder. Given the DigiTech Talker was used extensively for Human After All, maybe it was one of the last songs recorded for Discovery? The DigiTech Talker wasn’t mentioned in the May 2001 interview, despite its use on Discovery.

Human After All notes (14 March 2005) #

DigiTech Talker and DigiTech Synth Wah are all over the entire album. But, did they use a DigiTech Synth Wah, or DigiTech Bass Synth Wah? They’re very similar pedals. The tremolo effect on The Brainwasher could have been done many ways. Maybe it was just an LFO modulating the amplitude on their Roland S-760 sampler? Maybe it was a guitar pedal? It’s an easy effect that can be achieved many different ways.

Random Access Memories notes (17 May 2013) #

In Lose Yourself To Dance, the “everybody’s dancing on the floor” vocals sound very crunchy and DigiTech Talker-like. The vocodeded vocals in Touch sound like a Sennheiser VSM201 switched to unvoiced, or using white noise as the vocoder’s carrier. Instant Crush could be Auto-Tune or some other kind of harmoniser. It sounds like Instant Crush constains some Sennheiser VSM201 chord layers in places.

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Talk boxes #

Daft Punk’s vocal effects can be broadly split into three categories: Talk boxes, vocoders, and harmonisers. They all sound vaguely similar and robot-like, and you could be forgiven for confusing them, but they’re extremely different techniques and technologies.

Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.

I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.

Also, there aren’t many talk boxes on the market. Daft Punk may have used a Heil Talk Box, a Rocktron Banshee, a home made talk box, or something else. The MXR M222 Talk Box is probably the best option if you’re looking to buy a talk box today, because it has a built in amplifier. The MXR wasn’t around when Around The World was created though, so that’s not the unit they used.

Daft Punk’s early albums extensively used a Roland Juno-106, so it’s likely that was the sound source for the talk box used on Around The World. It sounds like a sawtooth wave with the filters open.

Even though they’ve been around in a commercial form since the mid 70s, talk boxes aren’t the first device to use human vocal tracts to create robotic sounds — the Sonovox from 1939 takes that prize.

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Vocoders #

Vocoders are a bit like an electronic version of a talk box. Vocoders take two audio inputs — often a voice and a synth — and combine them by filtering the synth with the voice’s frequency response. The filtering is usually done by splitting the signal into frequency bands. The volume of each voice band sets the volume of the repective synth band. More bands usually means a higher quality and more intelligible result. I’ve been calling the inputs “voice” and “synth”, but they’re often referred to as the modulator and carrier. The modulator filters the carrier.

Vocoders can be analogue or digital. Good analogue vocoders are physically big and very expensive, due to their complexity, especially if they have lots of frequency bands. They’re also a specialty effect, and therefore usually not mass produced.

The peak for high-end analogue vocoders