10 Stupidly Fun Toys Every Musician Needs

5. Talk Box

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIN_X7BPu-8 Have you ever tried to play 'Living On A Prayer' and wondered why it never sounds right? Or could you be a Peter Frampton fan and wonder how he makes his guitar talk? Well the answer you're looking for is a talk box. Talk Boxes are painfully cool pieces of kit. They're generally speaking a medium-sized floor unit with a long plastic tube coming out of it. Normally little self-contained amps, when they are activated they cut off the signal to your amplifier, also requiring the use of a microphone to work properly. The box has a small speaker driver in it (hence the size of them), when it is turned on the sound coming into the input is outputted by the speaker up through the plastic tube. The plastic tube is usually taped to a musician's microphone stand or held in their mouth. When sound comes up the tube, the musician then moves their mouth to create shapes for the audio to move around in, which is then picked up by the microphone on stage and mixed in with the normal guitar sound. The overall effect is that the guitar/keyboard sounds like it is "talking", depending on how the musician has moved their mouth. The easiest way to demonstrate the way this works is for you to play some music on your phone and hold the phone's speaker next to your open mouth. Then simply move your mouth, close it slightly, widen, mouth words and the music coming from your phone will change depending on the shapes you're making. It's an insane idea but the talk box is one of the most brilliantly barmy devices out there for any musician to use. Even just as a toy to play with it, it's brilliant. They also happen to make you look absolutely insane when you use them, but all the best toys do.