I have always wondered how they get the high pitched voices to match the music.
I know they speed up the tape (or whatever the recording medium is) to get the Chipmunks' voices, but how do they get it to match the regular speed music so perfectly? I would love to know that! :)
They don't speed up the tape, that'd be too much work. They simply raise the pitch of the voices. Think about how slow you'd have to sing some of the songs to get them to match, no one wants that job.
So simply they sing at normal speed to the music, someone raises the voice pitch and puts it to the music and voila Chipmunks.
"Am I missing an eyebrow?"
Thank you, so much! :)
shareActually, they could have done it by singing slow.... I got the DVD of the new chipmunks movie, and it has a "Making of..." feature. In the movie, the singers basically sang really slow then sped up to get the voice. Makers did mention that it took months to do it and it was one of their most ambitious project. Plus the music CDs, high pitching a song is just too easy with a free software and it sound wrong. So the makers were singing the songs slowly, to give more clean, original sound. Bit of calculations there, and it all can be worked out. How you think the songs for the 80s shows or even the 60s shows were made with such fine detail and timing? There wasn't any software or that advanced technology at that time but the songs still became amazing.
So they could have used the common technique. For these kind of projects, there's a trick to finish it quickly (This is the technique I suggest. I study animation): Singers first sing the song with their original voice at normal speed, the soundtracks are handed over to the animators to get the timing and while the animation is under production, at the same time the singers are singing slowly. Then the songs are high pitched to a normal speed and you got the chipmunk sound. The animation (especially traditional) takes as much time as the making of the songs.
i felt sorry for the woman they used did you see how
tied she looked after finishing the songs
she said a boght her lips going blue
theres un alvin and the chipmunks 2 coming out i cant wait
one of the main reasons they have to do it that way is because speeding up doesnt work. sure your voice sounds all funny and chipmunk-like but the voice goes so fast you dont hear everything properly.
thats whay they have to do the "speak/sing slow" technique, this way they pronounciate and announciate everything perfectly so when its sped up, you clearly hear what they say and sing.
Chip & Dale are a good compairison, listen to them talk in all the old Disney shorts, its often hard to understand them. i wouldnt be surprised if they only sped up the voices after the fact in that case. Obviously by the time we reach Rescue Rangers they likedly used the Chipmunks technique. I'm sure it was easier on them since Chip is the only one who had that "high pitch" voice effect, Dale was just a normal goofy voice, no speeding up needed.
When the Chipmunks were created, they sure as heck did play the voices in fast forward to get that effect. Digitally altering voices wasn't possible until decades later. By the time of these movies (90s), I'm sure they were done digitally to voices speaking regularly, like they do with South Park.
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