Vocal Effects Built Into a Vintage Telephone

You’re no stranger to vocal effects if you listen to any music made in the last few decades. Some of them, such as the infamous Auto-Tune, are simply intended to make a singer hit their notes more accurately — whether naturally or not. Others are a bit more like guitar effects and make vocals sound distorted in some way. Those effects are usually added somewhere in the sound system chain these days, but it used to be more common to handle it more directly. Imgurian Jellzey took the later approach and built vocal effects into a vintage telephone for his band.

The phone that Jellzey used is a vintage Western Electric Model 500 rotary telephone. That model was made in the millions between 1950 and 1984 and issued by Bell System in North America, which makes them very easy to find for anyone who wants to use one for a project. Jellzey’s work put a low fidelity microphone inside the receiver along with a monitor, and vocal effects that are performed in real time. Those effects can be heard through the audio monitor in the handset, or piped out to an external sound system for live shows. Other than a few knobs and switches on the exterior of the phone case, the Western Electric Model 500 looks original after the modifications.

Vocals are picked up by an electret microphone and fed to a switchable bandpass filter. There is also an integrated PT2399 digital delay, which works similarly to old-fashioned tape delay sound effects. Volume and the delay timing can be adjusted with the potentiometer knobs on the side of the phone housing. All Jellzey has to do is hold the handset up and sing, and the vocal effects will be added to the audio. While commercially-made vocal effects devices can do exactly the same job — and also a lot more — it’s hard to imagine a cooler looking setup for on-stage performances than this vintage telephone project.