Unwarping Underworld Vocals

[Resolute]

So there's several distorted vocal samples used throughout Dubnobass era songs that I've been trying to figure out lately. I don't know if I'm allowed to post the short comparison clips I've made, but I'll at least try to explain how they're distorted and what they are.

Dark and Long (Album and 1st Ruff):
There is a deep growl noise used throughout the song. Sped up by 275% in Audacity, this is actually Karl saying "You ok?".

Surfboy:
The yelling that happens throughout the track. Pitch it up by about 30% and its someone yelling "Underworld are in the house".

Spoonman:
There's this quiet scraping percussion sounding noise used as a loop throughout the track. Thanks to the disc 5 version on the Dubno Remaster, where it loops differently, I figured out its actually a pitched down loop of Karl saying "It's cold". This can be heard in the album and live rehearsal versions by pitching it back up.

Big Meat Show (DAT version, not Anthology):
More deep growls during the intro. The first is slowed down the most, then there are two more slowed down a bit less. The first needs to be sped up by around 275%, the second pair need to be sped up by about 150%. This is the "Nova, nebula" sample from Eclipse, though its used as "Nova-- Nova, nebula" here. Seems the song borrowed a bit more than just some percussion from Eclipse at one point.

Dark Train:
The "Garage, with loads of stuff" sample. Can be heard a bit clearer in Dark and Long Burts. It needs to be sped up or pitched up by about 25%.

I'm still attempting to figure out if anything can be done to salvage the cut up vocals in Spikee, still trying to figure out a decent way to understand the vocals in Most 'Ospitable.

If anyone remembers any other weird sounds that could be good to investigate or knows what any other distorted vocals are it'd be nice to document it.

[botkiller]

That's brilliant. Thanks for doing that work -- there's always more to be found in UW's songs, I've found. I really look forward to what else you find. Can I ask how you did it? I am an audio engineer and always interested in reverse-engineering audio.

[Resolute]

for these songs it was pretty simple to do, you just need a program like audacity that lets you manipulate waveforms. audacity has some decent built in tools for pitch, speed or tempo editing.

Open one of these songs in audacity, select the section of audio with the sample, use the change speed or pitch tools and you can enter a specific percentage to increase or decrease the sample by.

There's another tool on the audacity website called Channel Mixer, which has a preset for mid-side decoding which will separate the audio into its mid and its side. The side channel contains mostly reverb and anything that was hard panned left or right, which is useful sometimes for hearing vocoders clearer in songs like Tongue.

If you have an instrumental track and the non-instrumental you can invert the waveform of one of them, and if the two waveforms are aligned you can cancel out most instruments and leave behind Karl's vocals and any sounds that aren't fully cancelled out. Did this myself with the songs from Barking and some from Barbara Barbara. Been meaning to see how many instrumentals from earlier albums exist to do this to more songs.

Hopefully this makes enough sense.

[WhiteNoise]

I'm not a mod or admin, but I don't think you'd break any rules if you posted your samples! People post DJ mixes and remixes here all the time, your transformed sped up / slowed down song snippets would be no different.

[Resolute]

currently the clips i made include the unaltered samples too, but i could always just include the edited sample on its own. i'll have to contact an admin probably before i can post anything though.

[TheBang]

Go ahead and post them together, in the same clip. A small segment of the unaltered song, and then the altered segment.

Originally Posted by Resolute

Surfboy:
The yelling that happens throughout the track. Pitch it up by about 30% and its someone yelling "Underworld are in the house".

This sounds cool. Where can you hear this one (timecodes?)? I'm not sure what yelling you mean.

Originally Posted by Resolute

If anyone remembers any other weird sounds that could be good to investigate or knows what any other distorted vocals are it'd be nice to document it.

There is "growling" at the beginning of The Hump (Wild Beasts). I thought it was animal growling, but yeah, it's probably more of the slowed words.

[Resolute]

Originally Posted by TheBang

Go ahead and post them together, in the same clip. A small segment of the unaltered song, and then the altered segment.


This sounds cool. Where can you hear this one (timecodes?)? I'm not sure what yelling you mean.


There is "growling" at the beginning of The Hump (Wild Beasts). I thought it was animal growling, but yeah, it's probably more of the slowed words.

Thanks, will do so later today.

The yelling in Surfboy happens the first time at around 3:11.

I had forgotten about the growling in The Hump, will look into that later too.

[TheBang]

Originally Posted by Resolute

Thanks, will do so later today.

FYI, I just added the ability to upload MP3 and M4A files of a reasonable size to post attachments.

Originally Posted by Resolute

I had forgotten about the growling in The Hump, will look into that later too.

Just noticed there's a bunch of growling at the end of the song too.

[Resolute]

I've added comparison clips to the first post and this post so you can hear the samples for yourself without doing any editing.

The Hump Wild Beasts
The Hump Wild Beasts uses a growl throughout the song, its the same sample the whole time but it changes speed sometimes, which I can't correct the edit for. It sounds like a sample of someone saying "Hello" repeatedly.

Will continue looking for samples on my own but again, feel free to suggest something that might be worth looking into if you have any ideas. Doesn't have to be from just Dubnobass.

[twicezero]

Thanks for letting us listen

Surfboy one was obvious to me - I've always sung along 'uuuunnnnddddeeerrrrrrwwwwooorrrrllllddddd!'

the others - especially 'You Okay' are fascinating...

I'm going to look for more now