Steve Duda ports The Pink Trombone speech synthesizer into a plugin

The legendary Pink Trombone speech synthesiser has been ported by Steve Duda for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Steve Duda needs no introduction around here; the Xfer Records founder has reached hero status for many, largely thanks to successful releases like Serum and OTT.

We can maybe say something similar about The Pink Trombone.

The Pink Trombone has been around for close to a decade as a web application, and for many, it’s already legendary.

If you’re new to The Pink Trombone, well, it’s probably the weirdest, funniest, and possibly best thing you’ll see today.

The original web app, developed by Neil Thapen in 2017, is an interactive vocal tract model and speech synthesiser.

You can still play around with the original now, adjusting pitch and intensity with voicebox control, shaping vowels with the tongue, and using the oral cavity to produce different consonants.

Over the last decade, people have sampled The Pink Trombone for everything from cartoonish sound effects to dark EDM and dubstep.

Steve Duda has created AU and VST3 versions for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with more parameters to play with.

In addition to the existing interactive elements, you now have Voice, Tract, and Play sections where you can tweak characteristics like breathiness, tone, and articulation.

It’s almost too easy to make comical sounds here, even when you aren’t trying to. It’s like the vocal equivalent of walking a very thin line between a concert violin and a slide whistle.

But you can also get these lovely, dark, synth-like vocal tones that are excellent for sparse melodic lines, or more complex pads in combination. Additionally, there’s a really nice dissonant quality as the voice drifts slightly.

You can generate sounds that would be right at home in a Mike Dean track, under one of his synth solos, which sounds ridiculous when you hear how funny The Pink Trombone can sound.

One of the coolest things Steve Duda has done with The Pink Trombone is to make two versions available inside your DAW: Instrument and FX.

The FX version lets you run any audio through the same vocal tract, giving the plugin much more potential.

You have to try it, even if you check out the web version first for fun; it’s different, it’s a bit clever, a bit silly, and it can sound great.

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