Formant effect for Levitating by Dua Lipa?

T

teokiatuan

Member
I'm struggling with creating an accurate patch that captures the formant guitar part in the song, featured in the very first two bars.


If anyone can provide some tips or provide a quick patch for this, i'd be very grateful. I can't quite seem to figure out what syllables and other settings to use. I think has damping might be required as well.



Thanks!
 
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Our band covers this song. I grabbed the actual songs from the YouTube video, extracted the sounds, and trigger it in my iPad that is already on my stand for sheet music.
The clips are loaded into Koala which is loaded into the AUM mixer. I have a Arturia Keystep 37 keyboard and have mapped this clips to four keys.
By the way, we also do Don’t Start and I cover the keyboard part with this rig except that I’m using a piano sounds. For that, I’ve used a AUM plug in to play each of the chords using one key each.

I can go into more details - let me know.

But this is not a sound you can get with the FM3.
 
BTW - you could do a less complicated version of what I do with an iPhone/iPad, the camera connection plug, and an inexpensive audio interface. You could literally just tap the pads on the app to play the clips....done.
 
iaresee said:
You sure that's guitar?

I think you're chasing a keyboard sound, which is hard.
Click to expand...

Doesn't have to be exact, but I think the FM3 is more than capable of something very close
Lance Holland said:
BTW - you could do a less complicated version of what I do with an iPhone/iPad, the camera connection plug, and an inexpensive audio interface. You could literally just tap the pads on the app to play the clips....done.
Click to expand...

That's not an option I'm interested in for now, but thanks for your suggestion.
 
I use the Roland GR-55 for that sound. The base of the sound is under the “Aaahs” PCM sound type. I haven’t tried to use the formant sound in the axe fx. I suspect it may be too far into keyboard/synth territory tho. I can’t recommend the gr-55/axe fx combo enough though, the other guitar player and I in our band run it into one of the axe fx loops and the combination of these units really expands the range of songs we can do with just guitars.
 
I don't think you can get very close to that sound with a traditional guitar signal, it's clearly a keyboard. Digitech effects used to have a YaYa filter which might get you kinda close, no idea how to emulate it on the FM3. Never heard any formant effects with that prominent of an "ahh" with a guitar.
 
teokiatuan said:
I'm struggling with creating an accurate patch that captures the formant guitar part in the song, featured in the very first two bars.


If anyone can provide some tips or provide a quick patch for this, i'd be very grateful. I can't quite seem to figure out what syllables and other settings to use. I think has damping might be required as well.



Thanks!
Click to expand...


The beginning of the song is definitely a keyboard part, I believe it was in Adam Neely's video where he talked about the lawsuit over the song, that he referenced either this podcast or a video of one of the members of the songwriting team talking about how those first few bars with that effect were one of the origin points of the song, and how that was on a particular synth/keyboard that he had.

Somewhat related: I was the video editor for this studio/live performance of "Levitating" and they don't even try to replicate the effect here, instead just having the guitarist play the same chords in a much more straightforward way (starts at about 0:50):

 
If I were to try creating this kind of sound on a guitar, I would probably try a volume block with autoswell, add a warbly chorus and maybe a delay to help sustain each chord.
 
FadingMemory said:
they don't even try to replicate the effect here, instead just having the guitarist play the same chords in a much more straightforward
Click to expand...

It's funny, there are cover bands which are more accurate to album arrangements than many of the artists they cover.
 
FadingMemory said:
The beginning of the song is definitely a keyboard part, I believe it was in Adam Neely's video where he talked about the lawsuit over the song, that he referenced either this podcast or a video of one of the members of the songwriting team talking about how those first few bars with that effect were one of the origin points of the song, and how that was on a particular synth/keyboard that he had.

Somewhat related: I was the video editor for this studio/live performance of "Levitating" and they don't even try to replicate the effect here, instead just having the guitarist play the same chords in a much more straightforward way (starts at about 0:50):

Click to expand...

That stripped down version really highlights what a top notch dance-funk tune it is. Thanks for that.
 
iaresee said:
That stripped down version really highlights what a top notch dance-funk tune it is. Thanks for that.
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Yeah, it's an awesome track/album as a whole, and while it's nowhere near a reflection of what I typically listen to, I instantly liked a bunch of stuff from this album when I first heard it (which was through work, admittedly.)

I did one other video for Dua Lipa (that I did prior to the previous one I posted) and I think this version of the song is even better than the studio/album version:

 
FadingMemory said:
The beginning of the song is definitely a keyboard part, I believe it was in Adam Neely's video where he talked about the lawsuit over the song, that he referenced either this podcast or a video of one of the members of the songwriting team talking about how those first few bars with that effect were one of the origin points of the song, and how that was on a particular synth/keyboard that he had.

Somewhat related: I was the video editor for this studio/live performance of "Levitating" and they don't even try to replicate the effect here, instead just having the guitarist play the same chords in a much more straightforward way (starts at about 0:50):

Click to expand...

Actually liked that a lot. Band was great too.

Her episode of Song Exploder was cool. Mostly don't care for her recent high-gloss pop videos though.

Were those Fractal units on the floor?
 
One thing that's interesting is that I've seen live-in-the-studio videos of her with mostly different band members, and they're always classy and well done, and always sound like her. Don't know how much that's her vs people she has around her, but there's clearly a pretty solid vision of her bag in there somewhere.
 
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