The vocal effects of Daft Punk

Summary

The vocal effects of Daft Punk Daft Punk have used a wide variety of vocal effects in their songs. A May 2001 interview in Remix magazine provided a rare insight from Daft Punk themselves on the topic. “People always ask us what vocoder we use, but every one of our vocal tracks uses a different vocoder effect. We have the old Roland one [an SVC-350], Auto-Tune, and a DigiTech Vocalist.” The quote delivers some vital clues, but it’s incomplete, covering only their first two albums. There’s no mention of using a talk box, despite Around The World almost certainly using one. The quote makes it sound like the DigiTech Vocalist is a vocoder, but it’s not. And for that matter, which DigiTech Vocalist model? There’s around 30 pieces of hardware in DigiTech’s Vocalist series, and quite a few of them were around before Discovery’s release in 2001. I’ve read comments suggesting the DigiTech Vocalist models with the “EX” suffix are special, but nobody seems to know why, and nobody has published a direct comparison to prove or disprove the theory. I decided to take on the challenge, and run the tests myself. Here’s a fraction of the Vocalist units I ended up buying. Why are there duplicates of the same model? Why is there a Korg ih in that photo? Before this article gets sidetracked with tests and some honestly quite interesting corporate partnerships, mergers, and lawsuits, here is a list of every Daft Punk album song containing robot-like vocal effects, and my guess on which piece of kit was used for the vocals. Album Song Effects Homework WDPK 83.7 FM Roland SVC-350 Homework Around The World Talk box Homework Teachers Ensoniq DP/4+ Homework Oh Yeah Ensoniq DP/4+ Discovery One More Time Auto-Tune Discovery Digital Love DigiTech Vocalist Discovery Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger DigiTech Talker Discovery Something About Us DigiTech Vocalist Human After All Human After All DigiTech Talker Human After All The Prime Time Of Your Life DigiTech Talker Human After All Robot Rock Di...