Posted on 03/04/2024 6:37:55 PM PST by nickcarraway
I'm sure 500 Bob Heils have crossed the border though, ready to innovate and make life better for all of us. So we have that going for us, which is nice.
Frampton Comes Alive! is a classic!
Wasn’t the Talk Box, or at least a similar effect, used in numerous radio “sounders” and during the late 60s and 70s ?
“Do you feel like we do?”
RIP
without Talk Box there would be no Autotune.
Without Autotune, there would be no Taylor Swift.
So, damn him to hell....
I had a chance to talk with Bob in person about 5 years ago. He was a very high profile person in the amateur radio world. He was at every. Major convention and all over YouTube. You could tell he loves the hobby and happily shared his expertise! He will be missed. De ka6s
Sonovox, dates back to the 1940s.
Ditto. I have Heil microphones on all of my mobile ham radios.
My Icom 7100, with supposedly a 100 watt transmitter only put out 30 watts until I replaced the stock mic with a Heil studio type mic.
Then it put out the full 100 watts.
The interviews with him on Youtube are well worth watching.
RIP, a great man.
No, that was the Sonovox.
The Sonovox applied a vibrator to the throat in order to excite the vocal cords without the use of the lungs. Speech or singing was done by using the mouth, teeth, and tongue as usual. It goes back to Alvino Rey, who was also a ham radio operator, you can find videos of it with his wife who was one of the King Sisters.
Bob’s talk-box was actually invented by Pete Drake, who was a studio musician at RCA’s famed Nashville studio B. Hie played his “talking steel guitar” into a speaker that conducted sound into the mouth via a tube. Bob Heil improved on it and made it louder for use with rock music.
PAMS of Dallas created many jingles using the Sonvox and even recorded a long piece of instrumental music for use as a bed named the “Sonowaltz”.
Frampton needs to at least raise a glass to him.
Thank you both.
What a source of knowledge is to be found among the FReepers !
Rocky Mountain Way IIRC was the first song to use it.
Peter has always been very thankful for Bob’s contributions to his career, which started when Heil was doing the sound for Humble Pie on tour. The manager, a mobster of some note, said “I’m taking the Pretty Boy (Frampton) solo!”. Peter’s girlfriend, Penny McCall, went to Bob after a concert and asked what he could recommend that she get for Peter as a Christmas gift, and Bob had the inspiration to think of the talk-box, and gave one to her to give to Peter.
You can find interviews on YouTube where Peter tells this story, but I heard it from Bob himself who was a good friend. I was shocked to hear of his passing after chatting with him in person just over a month ago. Cancer is a horrible disease that robs us of many of our best people.
Wikipedia......
In its role distorting vocals, Auto-Tune operates on different principles from the vocoder or talk box and produces different results.[7]
The two are not related.
You might be thinking of the vocoder.
BB— Great post. The kind that makes FR my favorite-ever website.
Bkbm
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