Episode: 51
Title: HPR0051: TalkBox
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0051/hpr0051.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:45:58

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Hello, this is the MeroVinci coming to you today for Hacker Public Radio.
Today I'm going to take a little side-track from my discussions of virtualization simply
because DeepGeek is also covering virtualization and a topic that I've definitely found very
very interesting, so it's a topic I do not want to discuss too and depthily to ultimately
turn people away from virtualization.
So instead, today I'm going to talk about another set project I've been working on that
is commonly known as a talk box.
Now a talk box was originally used back in the 60s, according to Wikipedia, was originally
used by Pete Drake and from Pete Drake it was also used by Stevie Wonder's, you used
in a George Harrison song, but the talk box pretty much became a mainstream instrument
with Peter Frampton and his album, Frampton Comes Alive, and you know everybody's familiar
with the single, do you feel like we do?
And from there is when it really picked up steam and moved on, other performers like Bon Jovi,
Frank Roger and Sam have used it all the way up to Slion, the Family Stones, and even
today it's been used by rappers periodically, as well as the food fighters have covered
it and many, many others throughout the years.
Now there is something that you threw my research of the talk box and you know looking
at the Wikipedia page, looking at other pages, it's found it very interesting that there's
a bit of a controversy over the origin of the talk box and that Bob Heel claims that
he invented the talk box, that he was the first person to produce the talk box and even
today that if you buy a talk box from your favorite musicians catalog, you will buy the
Heel talk box, the H-E-I-L, but apparently there is also a device from custom electronics
that was referred to as the bag, which apparently has the same concept of a talk box and works
in the same principle as a talk box.
And so you might be asking, well how does the talk box work?
And a talk box works by taking an output signal from an amplifier, so normally this is used
with a guitar but is not limited to a guitar.
So from the guitar amp, some way is playing the guitar, it's plugged into an amp.
From the amp it goes out to the main speaker that everybody here is for the guitar, but
then also it splits and goes out to a secondary speaker.
Now this secondary speaker has some sort of cone or funnel or something like that attached
to the top of it that has a tube leaving the top of the speaker, the top of this extra
speaker, and the tube runs usually up a mic stand and is sitting right next to a microphone.
So what this does is as a person plays the guitar, it not only comes out the main amplifier
for everyone to hear, but it also comes out the secondary speaker up this tube in which
case normally a vocalist would step up to the microphone where the tube was in their mouth.
So now we have this guitar sound coming through the tube into the vocalist's mouth and then
the vocalist will move their mouth as if they're singing and instead of letting their vocal cords
produce the noise and their mouth shape the noise and produce words, instead they let
that guitar sound be the noise in the mouth or the audio in the mouth and the mouth shapes
that to produce similar to words or similar to words which then comes out of the mouth
back into the microphone and then out the house PA for the house speakers for everyone
to hear, which is why a lot of Peter Francis do you feel like I feel? He's playing the guitar
as he's mouthing the words, do you feel like we feel and that's pretty much what you hear
is, do you feel like we feel like we do, whatever that is I've already forgotten.
Now this is different from how a vocoder works, a vocoder, I'm sure many people are familiar
with the vocoders, but a vocoder takes a vocal signal, takes the vocal sound as it comes
through the microphone and then processes it and analyzes it and processes it to give
it a different sound or a different noise like a computer sounding voice or something like
that, two different methods which I think ultimately could replicate the vocoder could
ultimately replicate the same thing as a talk box, however they do work physically different.
So as I've been researching talk boxes this weekend, I found that there's a bunch of
people on the internet, like there's a bunch of people on YouTube who have made videos
of themselves making what's referred to as a ghetto talk box. Now a ghetto talk box is as it
sounds it's creating a talk box, ghetto estically I guess, or in a ghetto fashion and pretty much
involves just taking a secondary speaker of some sort and putting your own tube over
that speaker and allowing the sound to come through that speaker. Now what a lot of people
are doing is they're just taking a simple pair of computer speakers that they have line
around, they usually seem to be powered speakers so that way you know they have the speaker
has its own amplifier to power the speaker and just taking these things apart using some
sort of a parabolic bowl shape device or some sort of bowl to enclose the speaker and usually
the amp as well in which case so they'll enclose the speaker, drill a hole into the bowl and
then stick their vinyl tube down in there or stick their tube down in there. Now typically
the tube is vinyl or some sort of plastic and it's also commonly about half an inch in
diameter for the outer diameter. Now this tube you can pick up anywhere, your favorite hardware
store, Lowe's Home Depot, I definitely bought mine at Home Depot for like about 10 foot
for I think it was like three bucks total you know real cheap stuff and for the speakers
I used is yes I had a pair of random speakers line around and I pretty much just you know
use a screwdriver, pry them open. I cut off the second the left channel that was with
my speakers because ultimately I didn't need it, excuse me, cut off the left channel
and went through our cabinets here at the house, found a topware bowl, drilled a hole in
the topware bowl with my drum, stuck the tube down in there and put the bowl over the
speaker and you know tried to use it as a talk box. Now we'll admit I didn't really
get the greatest results out of this so instead my good friend the Reverend Bill he came
up with this the idea of maybe I should take a funnel and put a funnel over the speaker
in which case I did we had an extra funnel line around and I stuck the funnel directly
onto the speaker and kind of taped it down and then stuck my hose on the end of the funnel
and it actually works fairly fairly well but as I've gone back and looked at some of these
designs for how to build a talk box everybody's everybody pretty much says that you need to
have like an airtight seal between the speaker and the edge of the and the end of the tube
so that way you know that all of the sound from the speaker is going straight to the tube
you know the sound's not bleeding off anywhere else and and going other places which is also
what some of the videos you'll see on the internet you know people are like there was one
guy who took his talk box and stuck it all inside of a large like rubber made container
and he used that to help dampen the sound around it so that way the sound from that speaker
didn't bleed out everywhere else. There was another guy who used who used like two plungers
that he pressed together and that helped trap the sound you know within within the plungers
and it seemed to work really well and using the funnel idea you know does seem to work
pretty well although I do have an issue I mean I can still audibly hear my secondary
speaker as well as you know the tube as it's in my mouth and I'm making I'm making the
noise so I just wanted to share with you guys the talk box and just some of the some of
the things that I've used it are some of the information that I found out about it there's
definitely tons of YouTube videos as well as there's a handful of instructables on how
to how to create a talk box I'll definitely include a link to some of these instructables
as well as maybe a few of these YouTube videos that I found were most helpful in the creation
of the talk box.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to C.A.R.O.N.C. for all