Creating a pilot voice: for game of film use

When designing sound in either films or games you often come across having to design vocals or dialogue in order to fit a certain environment or situation. This is different from sound effects because your not specifically going for a specific sound, well that’s not true when using sound effects you should always try to match it to the scene or other sounds so they mesh together. What I’m talking about is what do you do when you have a film where there’s a pilot or a someone on the phone or on the radio, you cant have it sound like a natural voice, it would seem out of place and contradict what we come to expect when we think of sounds like that. So how do you make a helicopter pilot sound like a pilot.

Well when you think of this situation there’s two possible routes one can take. The first is assuming that you’re in the helicopter with him, so not only do you have to think how he should sound you have to incorporate the sounds of the propellers and electronics. If were not in the pilots view but in the view of someone receiving his dialogue through a radio than that is different situation, your probably not going to get much of the helicopter sounds just his voice.

When creating the voice you want to put a high pass filter and slide it to about 500 hz or more, and then put a low pass filter and cut off most of the high end as, remember your trying to simulate the sound coming of the radio and they do not have frequencies that go up or down that much. Finally to add the final touch you can add some distortion to really make it sound authentic