

For example, the main vocal of Three Six Mafia’s 2008 rap hit Stay Fly featured a stutter, and Skrillex’s 2010 global smash Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites exposed the world not only to dubstep but to vocal chops too.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, vocal chops have cropped up in multiple genres and featured in many chart-topping songs. Though vocal chops were not nearly as prominent in the 1980s as they are today, the VSS-30 made it possible and, as a result, the keyboard is still highly regarded by modern-day producers. Users could therefore record and modify their own voice and implement the resulting clips in their melodies. The product allowed users to record two-second clips of any sound and play them back instantly. One of the most notable came in 1987, when Yamaha released its VSS-30 Digital Voice Sampler. In the 1980s, multiple companies released keyboards that could record and manipulate sounds and voices. We can, however, point towards a few important milestones. Both are reasonable arguments but the moment the technique was pioneered in a music-production context is more difficult to pinpoint still. You might instead state that vocal chops were born in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the microphone. You could argue that the origins of vocal chops came in 1857, at the very moment mankind successfully proved it could record sounds. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you a tried-and-tested method that will give you easy access to your own vocal chops using nothing but FL Studio plug-ins. Because every producer has his or her own version of the technique and everyone is starting with their own novel vocal or sample as a base, vocal chops can result in enormously divergent productions that rarely sound alike. The most valuable thing about vocal chops is that, with the right level of manipulation on your end, you can effortlessly ensure that they always sound distinctive.

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a major producer that hasn’t used vocal chops in at least one of their projects. You’ll hear them in almost every style of music but they’re particularly prevalent in dance.
