Electro-Harmonix Golden Throat Talk Box

The Electro-Harmonix Golden Throat is the talk box that made a synthesizer sing. Roger Troutman of Zapp played one for years, and his robotic, soulful hook on 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love” (1995) is the most famous talk box performance in hip hop.

How a talk box works

A talk box is not a vocoder and not Auto-Tune. The Golden Throat uses a small speaker driver to pump the actual sound of an instrument up a plastic tube into the player’s mouth. The player shapes words with their mouth while a microphone picks up the result. There is no electronic voice processing at all: it’s the instrument, shaped by a human mouth.

History

Electro-Harmonix sold the Golden Throat from the mid-1970s into the early ’80s. Peter Frampton made talk boxes famous in rock, but Troutman took the sound into funk. He drove his Golden Throat from a Minimoog and later a Yamaha DX100, and built Zapp’s whole identity around it.

West Coast legacy

Zapp and Roger records became some of the most sampled songs in West Coast rap, and Troutman worked with hip hop artists throughout the 1990s. On “California Love” he sang the talk box hook and brought back the “shake it, shake it baby” chant from Zapp’s 1982 single “Dance Floor.” DJ Quik and a long line of West Coast producers kept the talk box in the mix after him.

Buying one today

Original Golden Throats are prized by talk box players. Check that the driver works at volume, plan to replace the tube, and make sure the unit connects properly to your amp. Keep the volume sensible, since the sound goes straight into your mouth. Heil, Rocktron and MXR make modern talk boxes if an original is out of reach.