How to Create Horror Character Voices with Voice Changer
Take a listen to the audio below, featuring some amazing voice transformations. Do they remind you of any famous characters from horror movies? Believe it or not, all these different voice effects came from the same plugin – Voice Changer, our creative voice modification tool that allows you to take your dialogue into new realms, with transformative environments and voice effects. Read on to find out how we made each villainous voice effect!
What is Voice Changer?
Voice Changer takes the raw material of a vocal performance and turns it into something entirely different. This kind of audio processing has been carried out in the film industry for years to create iconic horror characters that have caused more than a few nightmares! Fortunately, you don’t need voice actors and an entire sound design department to get similar results, and we’ll show you how.
While voice manipulation effects can be created in an audio or video editor using existing audio tools like choruses, flangers, reverb, high and low cut filters, and EQ processing, Voice Changer makes it incredibly simple and easy to get the same result. You can be a complete beginner in the world of audio editing and production and still end up with exactly what you’re looking for when using this plugin.
Creating horror voices
Voice Changer has three available slots: Character, Effect and Environment. Character allows you to cycle through a range of different character effects that alter the pitch and tone of the voice recording. The Effect slot contains effects that control the timbre and type of processing that is applied to the voice, making it more robotized, organic, or alien. Finally, the Environment slot controls the location that the voice is in, and can be used to make the voice sound more distant, close up, or in a large reflective space.
We’ve got three pieces of audio that we want to split into three voices using Voice Changer, so let’s place each one on a separate track in our editing software, and work on each character separately.
Demon voice
For the first voice, we’re going to try and create a demonic character like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.
In the Character slot, we’ll click into the Supernatural subcategory and load up the Monster preset. This gives the voice a deep and demonic tone that’s exactly what we’re looking for. We’ll set the Processing knob at 45%. To further enhance this effect, we can load up Double Voice in the Effect slot at 23%. The addition of a slight doubling effect makes the character’s voice seem even more unsettling
In the Environment slot, we’ll add a little bit of reverb to the character’s voice to make him seem more otherworldly. Adding Cave (Small) at 17% makes it feel like we’re hearing a monster like Freddy speaking to us from the dream world!
Creepy twin voice
Next up, we’ll create a haunting effect with children’s voices, similar to the Grady Twins from The Shining.
The first thing we can do is to go into the Humans subcategory in the Character slot and choose the Baby preset. This effect pitches your audio up, making it sound childlike. As our voice actor is a man, we’ll need to set the Processing knob quite high, at 70%.
To make it sound like there might be two people speaking, we can put Double Voice on the vocal and crank it up to 75%. Finally, we’ll add some spacious reverb to the character’s voice with Cathedral from the Public Spaces subcategory in the Environment slot. If you hear this character speaking to you from down the hallway, it might be time to leave!
Telephone stalker voice
Last but not least, we’ll try to make a weird prank caller telephone voice like Ghostface from Scream.
We’ll start with the Effect slot this time, and load up Phone from the Devices subcategory. This makes the voice sound like it’s coming from a phone speaker, and we’ll keep it at 50% processing. Any higher and the voice starts to distort too much.
Next, we’ll add Whispering from the Humans subcategory in the Character slot. Setting this effect at a really low level – 3% – makes the voice sound creepier without overprocessing the signal. There’s no need for any spacious echoes here, so we’ll add Nice Room at 17% into the Environment slot, to give the sense that the phone call is happening in someone’s living room. Hopefully not yours!
With Voice Changer, you can take a simple piece of audio and turn it into something completely different. Our horror characters came to life with only a small bit of effort, and you can do it too if you download Voice Changer now! If you want to go further into the world of ghosts and ghouls, you can also learn how to make your content even scarier with our guide to horror audio effects.
