How's this deep, breathy sound made?

stashspliffs

@hank_chill
I've noticed this sound in a few indie-ish songs lately. It's a deep vocal sound but also sounds synthesized. I've noticed it so far used by crystal castles in a song called "celestica" ( Crystal Castles - Celestica (High Quality) - YouTube - about 1:30) as well as purity ring on most of their new album. One specific example is "lofticries" ( Purity Ring - Lofticries | HD - YouTube - you'll notice it right away). Just a general question: how can I achieve some sound close to this, do you think the samples are original, or that they are synth-based? Do any particular synths come to mind?
 
crystal castles is a pitch shifted vocal played back via a sampler or through a melodyne/autotune type device that has a pre-written line it is shifting the vox to - it has the hallmarks of a severely pitch shifted sample, so I am more inclined to the idea that it is a sample that has been pitch mapped to a certain space o the keyboard and the sampler handles the playback transposition

same thing with purity ring
 
Possibly - the more I think about this more I am convinced that it is also a low-fi sample depth something like the Akai S9000's 12 bit mono - it just has that gritty sound that the S900 had when you recorded anything and then tried to play it back at a higher or lower pitch that was beyond the normal +/- 1 semitone from actual pitch......
 
Any sampler will do it because you are applying gross pitch shifting to the samples used and the graininess that you can hear will happen regardless of your sampler bit depth. I was just commenting that it seemed more lo-fi than hi-fi bit depth the more I thought about and identifying where I remember sound like that being made.....one of the benefits of having been doing this for so long is you learn to recognise a sampler by ear simply how it reproduces sounds with ridiculous pitch mapping
 
Back
Top