Talk Box

[Bo Borland]

Does anyone have a design schematic for a talk box?
I built one for a friend a long time ago, it worked but with no tone control or filter.
I used the driver from a high freq. horn, a metal project box, some poly tube, some pvc plumbing parts, and the required plugs & wiring .


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Bo Borland
All my gear is "vintage" now.

[Bill Terry]

I don't have a schematic, but I seem to remember that all that was involved with those guys was a passive high pass filter to protect the driver.

Just a thought, you might want to use a driver with 'field servicable' diaphragms, I remember that they had a tendency to blow fairly regularly in that application.

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bterry.home.netcom.com

[Michael Brebes]

Don't use a high frequency horn driver. There are horn drivers available that are made for general use, like on the old Cobraflex horns. They usually go down to atleast 500Hz and work well, without the need for any high-pass filtering. I use and old University Sound driver but I think EV makes one as well.

[Dave Boothroyd]

There is an alternative- especially if you don't like the idea of playing with a tube in your mouth!
You could get a Vocoder.
You put the steel into one input and a mic into the other. Then you play and talk or sing into the mic and the Vocoder takes the speech formants (thats the way your mouth alters the acoustic content of your basic vocal cord sounds) and applies them to the guitar sound.
Some multi effect boxes have a vocoder preset, or there are dedicated ones like the Digitech Talker.
You would need to use a richer guitar sound- perhaps with a little distortion, so there would be high harmonics for the machine to use to make consonant sounds, but this would apply to the pipe type too- hence all the emphasis on HF drivers and high pass filtration.
I don't know an easy way to make one though!

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Cheers!