Formant filtering

[shahbazi]

Hi there, just wondering if anybody can explain formant filtering to me. Im trying to recreate a roaring bass sound, such as those on borgores tracks. I hear the key is formant filtering but i have no idea where to start. thanks

[meer]

3 or so parallel bandpass filters, pretty narrow, sweeping around different frequencies. how you'd do it depends on the software you use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant

[shahbazi]

Hmm how would i go about this using albino vst in ableton? thanks

[p.t.b.d]

you couldn't create an as affective bass just using albino you would have to use some extra plugins.
I usually use logic pro's formant filter

[meer]

I haven't used live very much, but if you know how to do frequency splitting in live, it's pretty much the same thing. Instead of splitting the sound into bass, mid and treble, split it with 3 bandpass filters. The article on wikipedia gives some frequencies that would work well as a starting point, but screw around until it sounds good. LFO's on the filter frequencies at different speeds will make it morph between vowel sounds, which is cool.
you could just download a formant vst and slap it on there, but ehh.

[shahbazi]

right, so using live how would i split it using 3 bandpass filters. Would i have 3 tracks each with an eq 8 on?

[wayoftheworld]

you can make a frequency splitter in ableton by loading up an audio effect rack, with 3 eq8s to split the sound.

[shahbazi]

So i would load my audio clip into a sampler, then next have a rack with 3 eq in it, each one letting through a certain frequency. I dont understand what this does, isnt this basically just letting ceratain freqencies of the sound come through? like a comb filter in albino maybe? What should i modulate within this? Thanks

[yamaz]

I would be interested if someone could explain this further. Say we have bass from massive....we put an effects rack as insert and load up 3 eq8's at different values and then what? Set up a macro button to three values for one rotary knob? but if I remember correctly, dont they need to move in opposing directions? Any tricks to using/modulating a formant filter?

[meer]

there's a bunch of different ways you could do it. what's important is that there are 'peaks' in the frequencies, and depending on where these peaks are, it'll sound like different vowels. it'd probably be best to have one knob for the frequency of each, with a sort of limited range, and then use knobs on a midi controller to tweak it around.
I'm sure you could set up a macro knob or w/e to control each frequency in a different way, so that the frequencies will move around in a freaky way.