Make your voice or music sound crazy with these special effects that you can apply post-process (after recording) or in real-time with a mixer.

Happy April Fool's Day! Rob Robideau, from the Personal Armament Podcast and a clients for my Subscribe & Follow widget, placed the idea for this April Fool's Day topic in my mind back in August.

I was wondering if you can recommend a piece of hardware or software to warp voices. I would like to do some comedy “pretend interviews” for my podcast and I have no idea where to start. …

I'm not really looking to impersonate a specific voice. I want to do some satire. An interview with a pro-wrestler about self-defense. An overzealous gun shop salesman. Something that makes my voice still sound human, just not like my voice. It doesn't have to be perfect, people will know it's humor. I just recently purchased a Behringer 2442FX if that helps with anything.

Special effects in Audacity

Included under the Effects menu

• Phaser
• Wah Wah
• Reverse
• Change speed
• Change pitch
• Change tempo
• Sliding Time Scale/Pitch Shift

Extra plugins and program * After you install an extra plugins, you can use it in Audacity. Try Turntable Warping MS * Extra program PaulStretch for Windows or binary for OS X for this effect:

Real-time effects with a mixer

I demonstrate 16 different effects that my Behringer Xenyx X1832USB ($305.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend, Music123) has built-in

• Reverb: Hall, Room, Plate, Gated, Reverse
• Ambience/Delay: Early Reflections, Ambience, Delay, Echo
• Modulation: Chorus, Flanger, Phaser
• Detune/Pitch: Detune, Pitch shifter
• Combination effects: Delay + reverb, Chorus + reverb

Here are a variety of smaller mixers with similar effects processing.

• Behringer Xenyx 1002FX—$89.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend, Music123
• Behringer Xenyx 1202FX—$108.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
• Behringer Xenyx X1204USB (like my previous four-channel mixer)—$167.99 Amazon.com, $196.99 Musician's Friend
• Alesis MultiMix 8 USB FX—$141.55 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
• Mackie PROFX8—$229.99 Amazon.com, Musician's Friend
• Almost any mixer with “FX” in the name, or higher-end Behringer mixers beginning with “X” in the model number (like my X1832USB)

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