For some costumes, the voice is just as important as the appearance. Unless you’re a voice actor, it can be difficult to try to mimic the voice that you need. Even if you are a voice actor, some character voices are impossible to recreate naturally because of electronic modification.
Luckily, there are ways to solve this problem. In some cases it’s actually very inexpensive to change your voice and give it a different sound. In other cases you might have to spend a bit more money and time. I’ll go over a range of options in this article that you can choose from to best suit your needs.
Most Affordable Option
If you’re short on money and want to do this as cheaply as possible, then a good option to is to buy a cheap toy voice changer online. These are usually around $10 USD, and they’re very simple. Some of them only have 3 different voice modes, some have a few more. The one I got has 5 switches that each give a different effect.
It’s very basic modification, and the tone isn’t very clear at all, but for some voices that might be all you need. For my helmet I was looking for a lowered voice effect with a bit of electronic distortion, and one of the modes on the toy actually fits it pretty well. For around 10 dollars it really isn’t too much trouble to buy one and try it out to see if it’ll work for the voice you need.
Installing It Into Your Costume
Unless your costume has a lot of room inside of it, you’ll probably want to take the electronics out of the toy and fit them into your costume. Usually the body of the toy is held together by a few screws. Once you take out the screws, you should be able to extract the circuit.
The circuit in these toys is very simple. It usually just consists of a little speaker, a microphone, a small circuit board, a power switch, and a battery. The whole system takes up very little space and can easily fit into many different places in a costume.
For my project, I decided to mount the electronics into the helmet of my costume. That might seem like an obvious choice, and for me it was, but it might not work for every costume. Some costumes don’t have helmets, or if they do there might not be enough room to mount the electronics and still fit your head inside.
If your costume is like that, then you can always mount the speaker somewhere else on your costume, like your chest or your hip. Wherever is comfortable for you and where it can be concealed by the costume. The only thing that absolutely needs to be near your face is the microphone, which should be positioned as close as possible to your mouth for clearer audio. Luckily the microphone is usually very small, so it can be easily concealed.
If you mount the speaker in a different place than the microphone, then you’ll probably need to add some length of wire to the circuit. If you don’t know how to safely modify electronics, then I recommend you find someone who has experience to do it for you. You don’t want to mess up the wiring and have the circuit not work anymore, or worse, spontaneously catch on fire.
The toy that I used, and most of the other toys that you can buy, are activated by a spring loaded trigger. You squeeze the trigger to start the voice changing, and then when you let go it turns off. This isn’t very practical for use in a helmet, because I would have to press and hold the switch down every time I wanted to use the voice changer.
To fix this, I removed the spring loaded switch and soldered in a flip switch. This way I can switch the voice changer on when I want to use it and it will stay on. All of the electronics, including the switch, are mounted inside the helmet.
My voice changer also included some LEDs that would light up whenever you spoke into it. I didn’t need them, so I just cut the LEDs off of the circuit and reconnected the wires. If you can find a toy without these unnecessary lights, then I would recommend you get that one.
After those slight modifications, all I had to do was affix the electronics into the helmet. The 9 volt battery didn’t have a bracket to hold it in place, so I 3D printed one. I just used hot glue to attach everything to the inside of the helmet, because I’ve found that that sticks pretty well to PLA plastic, which is what my helmet is made of.
Make sure to test the fit of your helmet before you glue everything in, to make sure that your head can still fit in. Also make sure that you can take it on and off without anything snagging.
Where To Put The Switch
If you want to be able to switch the voice changer on and off more discreetly, instead of reaching up into your helmet every time, then you might want to add some longer wires so that you can mount the switch somewhere else. A popular place that I’ve seen a lot of people do this is on their hand or their fingers. That way, if they ever want to switch it on or off, all the have to do is squeeze their hand or pinch their fingers together. This will make it easier if you need to switch back and forth frequently between your normal voice and the altered voice.
If you do this, you’ll have to conceal the wires from your helmet all the way down to wherever you decide to put the switch. This will mean that you’ll probably need to have something covering your neck and/or hands. Just be aware that this can make your costume a lot hotter to wear. Unless you’re okay with having the wires exposed, or if they can be worked into your costume.
Slightly More Expensive Option
There are other, more expensive devices that you can find online that offer a wider range of voice modifying effects. These range from around $20 to $50 USD. They usually have more settings than the cheap toys, and the output tends to be a bit more clear. Here’s a link to an example.
However, these devices usually don’t come with their own built in speakers. They’re designed mainly to be connected to a phone, computer, or gaming system. This means that you’ll have to use a separate speaker, which will take up more space on your costume. It’s also another expense if you don’t already have one.
A lot of these voice changers say that they don’t connect directly to a speaker, so you would have to connect it to your smartphone first, and then connect your phone to something like a Bluetooth speaker. There are Bluetooth speakers that are very compact that could fit in a small pouch on your costume.
They also usually don’t come with a microphone, because they’re designed to be used with a headset. If you have headphones with a built in microphone, those should work.
Custom Voice Modulation
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, or you know a bit about audio or music recording, then you might want to try custom editing the voice yourself. This is a good option if the preset voice modifiers don’t suit the voice that you’re trying to make.
There are two main ways to do this: with software or with hardware. The software option would involve editing the voice within a program like a Digital Audio Workspace, or DAW. To do it with hardware you would need a device that can edit the audio and/or add effects.
These options will probably involve you recording some lines, editing them, and then saving them onto a device like your phone to play later. This will make it so that you can’t say whatever you want in the edited voice in the moment that you’re using it. However, you can prerecord any catchphrases or famous lines from your character, and maybe some simple responses so that you can still have some interaction with people in your costume.
Voice Editing Hardware
If you decide to use hardware to edit your voice, it might be possible for you to have the settings fixed on that device so that you can carry it with you on your costume. This would allow you to say whatever you want in the moment, with the edited voice. That’s pretty much the ideal scenario, but it means that you’ll have to somehow fit the hardware onto your costume. This will add extra weight and bulk, but it might be worth it for you.
As for what kind of hardware to use, these will usually be soundboards that have a bunch of knobs that each edit a different aspect of the audio. Some of them will also have effects that you can add with the push of a button.
The more money you spend, the bigger the soundboard you can get, and the more options it will give you. This is good for editing prerecorded audio samples, but not so practical if you want to carry the device with you.
There are some smaller soundboards, some are even the size of your palm. Just because they’re small though, doesn’t mean that they won’t have the features you need. I have one soundboard that’s about 4 ½ by 5 ½ inches, that can be used to adjust the treble, bass, and reverb of your voice. For some voices, that’s all you need.
Voice Editing Software
If you’re going to prerecord and edit the voice samples beforehand, then you might want to just do it with software. It kind of makes sense to use a free program like one of these instead of spending money on a soundboard.
There are many free audio editing programs available online. One of the most popular programs that you might find is Audacity. There’s also Ocenaudio, which some people say is easier to use than Audacity. I’m not an expert with these programs, but you can find plenty of online video tutorials for how to use them to add effects to your voice.
Sampling
I know this article is about voice changing, but there might be a simpler and easier way to get the right voice. You might be able to sample audio clips directly from the source material of the costume you’re making, whether that’s from a movie, video game, or whatever else.
All you need to record audio samples is a decent microphone and a computer. Just open an audio editing program and record it straight into that, then you can edit it as you like. You can buy a decent microphone for only 20 or 30 dollars, so it’s not a huge expense.
You have to be careful with this kind of thing because of copyright issues, but as long as you’re using it for your own personal use and not making it available to other people, it should be okay. There’s nothing wrong with using clips of a voice in public, but if you try to make money off of it by selling the clips, then you could get in trouble. Just be smart and don’t do anything that infringes on anyone’s intellectual property.
One issue that you might run into when you try to record audio samples is background noise. It can be hard to find good moments in the source material where there isn’t music or other noise playing in the background. Luckily, it’s sometimes possible to filter out some background noise with a program like Audacity, or other audio editing software.
Conclusion
There are many different options for adding voice effects to your costume, so all you have to decide is what works best for your project. I hope that this article gave you some ideas on just how much you can do. You don’t need a huge budget to pull off some convincing effects, but if you want to spend more money you have that option as well.