Fresh startĪny vocal or a capella that you can source from the real world or the web can form the starting point for characterful vocal chops. The biggest reggaeton hit of 2017, Mi Gente by J Balvin and Willy William, is characterised by its catchy vocal-chop melody.

Vocal chops are used frequently in dubstep, as well as wider subgenres of EDM such as future house, and big-name producers such as Martin Garrix and Diplo have used the method to spice up their songs. The electronic producer still incorporates vocal chops in his productions today, just listen to his 2019 track Mumbai Power.

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.

Fl studio vocal samples