Distort voice

First of all - I am not an English native, so even though I have searched, maybe I have not searched for the right terms.

I am a newbie on Ardour, but I have many years of experience on video editing. For me, there were two options when it came to audio editing. ProTools or Ardour. And I really wanted to see what could be done with Ardour, so I got a subscription.

So far, I have managed to get it up and running, gotten the session set up so things are working. Imported two tracks of audio that was exported from video editing and now I am looking at plugins.

I need to change the voice of a person in an interview so that it can not be recognized. The audio of that person is on a separate track, so I can do it in the mixer with plugins, I guess?

But what plugins to use? Are there any free plugins that will do the job?

I am grateful for any tip. Sorry if this sounds real easy to you, but to me it is a challenge :slight_smile:

You didn’t tell us if you are on Linux, OS X or windows, so I will just assume you are using Linux :slight_smile:

One way of making a voice unrecognizable is to detune it with a pitch shifter plugin. Using just one pitch shifter will not protect your speakers identity if someone really wants to know who is speaking. It’s easy to try to change it back. You get a much better protection if you use two pitch shifters one tuning up and one tuning down. Also don’t use guessable tunings (whole semitones, 10% , 20% etc) instead use percents that are not whole numbers if possible.

I have not tested these myself but you could take a look at these:

Tap Pitch Shifter
Rubberband

Here is a forum post discussing pitch shifter plugins:

https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=11157

Using the Rubber Band Pitch Shifter (Breakfast Quay), Auto Wah (Fons Adriaensen) and Calf Flanger you can get this result and it’s stay relatively understandable.

@mhartzel This is posted in the Windows forum, though there is no indication of it if you reach the post by some methods.

   Seablade

Sorry - did not think you could reach the forum without noticing that it is in the Windows section. So yes, I am on Windows.

@phdemartin That seems to work pretty well! Will try that! Thank you!

@phdemartin I could not find any plugins that I can use in Ardour that is called Rubber Band Pitch Shifter. Do you have a link?

I always read forums by using the “Recent Posts” - link. That shows all posts and doesn’t tell what subforum the posts are on. But perhaps in the near future we will have a new forum ? I think I read somewhere that there is somebody working on migrating forums on a new platform at the moment.

@Oceanwatcher
I’m under linux and it is included in my repository, but pitch shifting is very commune, every pitch plug-in will do the job.
I don’t know any windows plug-in, but perhaps, someone in the forum have some clue ??