I was hoping for your review. DELIVERED.

Old Zircon's birthday is coming up, you guys!!

And so is zurf's!!

Only 7 months away!

I've never had a good vocoder, I've got an Electrix Warp Factory which is very fun and very cheap an very digital, but Dan Deacon apparently based his whole sound around one for a while so maybe some day it will be cool.


Now talkboxes are another matter, because you can build a really good talkbox for like $50 as long as you already own an amplifier. I'd have a lot of talkbox opinions if I weren't so terrible at using them. One thing I can say is the Rocktron Banshee is absolute garbage, I got mine free and the $8 or so to get a new piece of tubing is already pushing it (but it's nice and portable so I still use it sometimes).

All you need for a really good talkbox is one inductor, one capacitor, one suitable horn driver, one 1/4" jack and something to hold the tube on (I splurged and paid the guy who runs www.gfworks.jp $40 - about as much as the entire rest of the parts combined - for one of his fancy, custom machined tube holders because it threads on to almost any appropriate driver so it's basically a lifetime investment as long as I don't step on it or lose it). All of the information you need is on his site.

Mine's completely overbuilt (you DO NOT need a crossover that serious but I erred on the side of not messing up my amplifier by accidentally using part that couldn't handle it - if the driver could take it I could probably hook that thing up to a PA powerful enough to literally physically hurt me if I used it as a talkbox) and ugly, since I used all trash salvaged from an office they're remodeling at work for the enclosure. But it sounds great, and that's the cheapest driver I could find that has the right specifications.

http://imgur.com/a/iIivi



Also the normal big tube you get with most talkboxes kind of sucks, I think it's a lot easier to get a good sound with a narrower tube like the one in the photo.



So there's the closest to a vocoder review you'll get out of me, hope you're happy.

Actually I think I slightly misinterpreted Jang's previous post. Anyway, there you have it.

Zurf, if you haven't read Dave Tompkins' book about the history of the Vocoder yet, you should. It's a really fun read:

http://howtowreckanicebeach.com/

looks like a cool read!

I have yet to get a good vocoder set up going - I have a boss se-50 and se-70 that apparently can work as a vocoder but for some reason it just doesn't quite work for me..

I've got an SE-50 but I never played around with the vocoder. It's a great little box, though. I'd love an SE-70 but I didn't grab one while they were still cheap (SE-50 was $40 but they're both pushing $200 on eBay last I checked). The Warp Factory really is great for the money. It has its own sound and is obviously digital but it's really musical and does some stuff no other hardware vocoder I'm aware of does, like a knob to control of the number of bands in real time. You could probably drive a truck over it and it would still work, too.

People really do kind of waste vocoders. Singing into them is about the least interesting thing you can do.

I like to put a reverb with a long decay on an aux send, patch the output of that into the carrier input of a vocoder, and then send the same dry signal from a second aux send into the modulator input. Also works well with a delay on the modulator signal, and/or a delay in place of the reverb on the carrier.


Patching reverb into the modulator and white or pink noise into the carrier works well sometimes, too.

ouch my brain... I guess I don't entirely get vocoders. On my Boss se-70 I tried setting it up with an amped microphone as modulator and a keyboard with a plain bright sawtooth wave as carrier.... the result I got was that changing the keys on the keyboard (changing the pitch of the carrier) would not change the pitch of the sound, but instead would change the brightness of the output... so basically going up the keyboard would sound like opening the filter... anyways, can't quite figure it out

If it helps, my understanding is that the vocoder does an FFT to the input signal and bins the results into as many channels as you need ( the analog circuit does this with a bunch of tuned bandpass filters ). The envelope of each channel is taken, and applied as a control signal to the gain of it's appropriately tuned amplifier. The signal you want to modulate is then run through all those tuned amps. That's more or less it, right Zirc?

Zurf, I never really got my SE-50's vocoder to work the way I expected, either, and neither did my roommate when I loaned it to him. For me, it seemed like no matter what I did it always blended the dry signal in, but maybe I was missing something.

The basic idea of the analog vocoder is basically a bunch of bandpass filters splitting the modulator and carrier into a bunch of different channels for diferent parts of the frequency spectrum, then the carrier's bands are run through VCAs and the modulator's bands are run into envelope followers. The envelope from each band in the modulator controls the output level of the corresponding band in the carrier. so playing differnet notes on the keyboard isn't exactly going to change the pitch of the output. If you use a really high note for the modulator and a really low note for the carrier you won't get much output at all, because the bands whose VCAs are being turned up by the modulator don't overlap with the bands where the carrier is. So you do have to kind of match the basic pitch of the modulator and carrier to get a classic vocoder sound. That's why basic wide band waveforms like square waves without any filtering work well as carriers - those old Korg(?) vocoders with the built in keyboard were using a simple string synth/frequency divider organ type of circuit for exactly hat reason. Try using a sound based on raw sawtooth or square waves for the carrier, that might help. Blending a little white noise in can make it sound more intelligible, too. If you're using your voice for the modulator, you don't need to sing in tune but try to pitch your voice so it roughly follows whatever you're playing into the carrier input.

MAybe mess with a software vocoder first to get the hang of it, since the SE-50/70 seems to act kind of weird and the VST vocoders I've used act like you would expect. Reaper includes a good vocoder plugin but I don't think there's a standalone VST version like there is for some of their other stuff. But Reaper's a really good DAW, so just download it and try it out if you don't already use it, if only to mess around with the vocoder.

Or alternatively, as long as your DAW can use VST plugins, you could download the Reaper VST plugin suite for free (they're good plugins in general so do it even if you don't need a vocoder):

http://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/

One of them lets you run programs written in Reaper's internal JS scripting language as VST plugins. A few years ago someone on WATMM coded a Bode-inspired vocoder plugin in JS that you could load with that:
http://forum.watmm.com/topic/85720-so-i-wrote-a-vocoder-in-js- to-sound-like-a-bode/

Literally just copy and paste all of that code from the WATMM post into the ReaJS plugin and it should work, although how you rout the modulator and carrier signals to it is going to depend on how your DAW works. Reaper's routing and modulation options are REALLY deep once you start poking around but I imagine any halfway decent DAW can do the job.


I've been really in to using the level of one track to modulate the gain of one band in an EQ on a different track in Reaper lately, so kind of like using a dynamic EQ with an external sidechain but a little different and more flexible. So, say you have a really wide band pad that dominates a lot of the frequency spectrum, and another track with a lead instrument that plays intermittently but is competing with the pad when it does. Instead of automating the level (or EQ) of the pad to make room for the lead, or using a sidechain compressor to duck the pad (both of which work and can sound good but are usually pretty obvious) you can use Reaper's built in facility to use any audio channel in the mixer to modulate any parameter of any plugin on mixer control to duck the frequencies in the pad that are competing with the lead. I'm sure some other DAWs can do this, and some dynamic EQs can to it, but being able to use whatever EQ you want is great, and Reaper gives you a ton of control of how the modulation responds to the audio:

http://tinyurl.com/zyblxow

This guy made a vocoder using just stock plugins and parameter modulation in Reaper:

http://buildingthingsbackwards.blogspot.com/2014/11/built-my-o wn-vocoder-in-reaper-daw-for.html

More about parameter modulation in Reaper:

http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/parameter-modulation


Did I mention I really like Reaper? I've sued a lot of DAWs over the years and it's the best AND the cheapest commercial one (especially cheap if you don't register it but you should they deserve it; I haven't yet).

I finally read Oscar Wildcat's post above, and he pretty much covered it all in a lot less words.

But I've got to use my degree for SOMETHING.

Tons of vocoded reverb in this, but you'd never know it was a vocoder:

http://tinyurl.com/zhlz9ny

As you say, you need a harmonically rich carrier because that's all there is to the output signal. The voder portion of the vocoder doesn't synthesize new frequencies, it just selectively amplifies what's in the carrier based on the modulation.

Somewhere back in POETV archives is a mechanical voder that used a pig's bladder and some other nonsense that escapes me at the moment that you manipulate with your hands to make a passable voice with practice.

Zirc's talkbox is also a kind of mechanical voder.

Zurf already said he used a bright sawtooth though.

I think it's down to the SE-50/70 being kind of weird (the 70 is supposedly much better in the vocoder department but I've only tried the 50).