The Formant Oscillator in Razor

NI Razor is great for making talking basses and vowel-like sounds, a great example being the vocoder and the formant oscillators. Let’s take a close look into the formant oscillators first, you can create some awesome sounds with these!

Formants are basically high resonant peaks at a very specific frequency, they tell us a lot about the character of the sound.

In other words, slight formant changes can alter the sound extremely.

The formant oscillators in Razor have multiple combinations of frequencies and filter types that you can choose from.
We can make a rich combination by using two of these oscillators together and summing the output into a filter.

An obvious choice for a filter would be the vowel filter to enhance the formants even further and make specific vowel sounds, very much like humans talking.
But for this tutorial I decided to go with the EQ Decay filter, basically an equalizer with automated frequency bands.

This filter can add a lot of movement to the sound because it changes the different frequency bands independently with a pre-defined amount of time.

Another extra touch is added by the comb filter, this one is optional but it can sound very cool!

Don’t forget to assign your macros to tweak your sounds into perfection!