Hi.

I just watched the youtube video about the Fallout New Vegas Voice Actors and is now contemplating shooting myself in the face for not connecting Matthew Perry and Benny.

How the hell did you guys manage that? What do you do to the voices? Now that you started me thinking, how do you do ghoul voices? I know they are voiced by regular people, but then what do you do to make it umm... ghoulish? Same applies to FO3 Fawkes/Supermutant dialogues.

I am an aspiring modder and would love to know how to manipulate voices so as to do ghoul characters in custom quests and such.

Thank you so much for reading.

I'm pretty sure they just talk all raspy. But seeing as that can damage the voice, they could just use voice changers and such things. I mean, you can get that free on your iPod, I'm pretty sure a big company can manage that.

Changing things with voices requires some good audio editing software. I use Roland V-Vocal which came with my copy of Sonar X1 Producer. It lets you control lots of things with regards to how the voice sounds. For example you can change a male voice to sound a little more female. It doesnt work perfect by any means, so generally for voice actors they only do pitch shifting (Requires VERY precise software to do it properly without being noticeable).

As for the raspy sound, Dalek is correct that it CAN damage the voice. BUT it can be done in a way that doesnt damage the voice at all (Death metal bands do it ALL the time and their singers voices arent damaged. Unless you're an idiot like the singer from disturbed who thinks it's cool to puke when you sing).

If you cant get the rasp that you want from just using your voice and throat, the easiest solution is to apply a small amount of gain which is probably how they did voices for the ghouls. You also cant forget about hi/low pass filters to get rid of certain frequencies. That will make the tone sound completely different when used properly.
Parametric EQ never hurts either and compression is always helpful for making sure that the spoken lines are relatively the same volume. (You can also get some of that extra rasp by cranking the makeup gain on a compressor).

Anyway, I hope this helps you a little bit. I'm hoping that you actually have some decent software and not just a copy of reaper or something. If you dont you can still find some free plugins to achieve some of these things, but generally good software comes with excellent compressors/gain/pitch shifters.