WHEN MACHINES DREAM

Those of you who know me or listen to my music know that I am ALL ABOUT the vocoder. And not for anything particularly interesting either, mainly for the most cliche'd of uses for the vocoder - the ROBOT VOCALS. Though I have several hardware options for vocoding, I have been on a quest to find and aquire a VST vocoder plug-in to make it easier to get my "domo arigato" on. Most of the VST versions I have tried in the past did not produce suitable results, the main issue being with speech intellegibility. One option I looked into was to purchase a Cylon, (ebay?) very effective if you don't mind editing  "By your command" off of the end of every vocal phrase. The downsides are that it is still hardware and having a piece of studio gear that is bent on destroying humanity seems inconvenient.
That being said, I set out to find the best VST vocoder I could. I scoured the net and downloaded every Freeware, Shareware and Demo I could find and spent 2 days putting them through their paces. For those of you that are unfamiliar with vocoders and how they work, I am not going into that here, so please Google it and come back. Before we get into the shootout results, I need to add a disclaimer. Vocoders are tricky to use with respect to signal routing and I may not have gotten them all working properly, so please note that in some cases the poor results may have been due to P.E.B.C.A.K. (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard) - your mileage may vary. For a host I used Ableton Live 6. As far as I can determine, there are 3 ways to configure a Vocoder in Live, depending on the vocoder. The vocoder VST's that I evaluated either "showed up" as an audio effect or a MIDI instrument, or sometimes both.
IF IT IS AN AUDIO EFFECT:
Set up 3 audio tracks - one each for the modulator, carrier and vocoder. Pan
carrier and modulator tracks hard L/R and send to vocoder track, then enable
monitor in on vocoder track.
OR:
Set up vocoder on a return track and set up audio tracks for the carrier and
modulator. Select "sends only" outputs for those tracks and send to vocoder return track.
IF IT IS A MIDI INSTRUMENT:
Set up an audio track for modulator and a MIDI track for vocoder. Enable MIDI in
on vocoder track and send audio from modulator track to it.

Anyway, On to the Vocoders..... (in no particular order)

So right off, the GUI while it looks very nice (typical of Fruity Loops ) it is
real small, and I found myself squinting to read it (also probably typical of
Fruity Loops). Unfortunately, I was unable to coax any usable sounds from it. It
should be noted that Kyle Ward, my musical partner has used this successfully in the past in his productions, and it sounded OK but not very intelligable.


This Vocoder works the way they all should. Super easy to route and the GUI is
very well laid out. Truly a joy to use. Unfortunately, the sound is not at all
what I'm going for. Would be cool to use on drums or other rhythmic instruments.
It's not that it's bad, it just doesn't produce the standard vocoder vocal effects
that I desire.


I had high hopes for this one. The GUI is great and the manual was good at
explaining how to use all of the controls but didn't cover getting it set up at
all. I am pretty sure that I got it set up correctly but alas, could not get any
usable sounds out of it.


The Prosoniq Orange Vocoder is a seminal VST. it's been around for about 10 years now.I evaluated the demo, which annoyingly "time out" every 5 minutes, but it worked reliable and configured logically. It makes very classic vocoder sounds and the chordal, choir-type sounds are quite nice. It is not, however, very intelligable. I think it would be good to layer with another vocoder to fatten up the sound (it is pretty fat sounding). Though it is kind of pricey for how it sounds and how old it is. Also, there is a good "how to" on using Orange Vocoder with Ableton Live here:
http://sonictransfer.com/vocoder-tutorial-ableton-live.shtml


This MAY be the best vocoder on the market. The GUI is great, and the sounds that I could demo were excellent. I evaluated a seriously feature-limited demo (there is a better demo available that needs to authorize a dongle), so I haven't been able to make my final judgement on this one yet. It is, however, quite expensive ($279) AND requires a hardware dongle to run (boo!) It seems to have some interesting features, like pitch-tracking of the modulator, requiring no external carrier. It also is very intelligable sounding. I will probably download the dongle-dependent demo and further evaluate.


Though not actually a Vocoder, I came across it during the shootout and decided to include it. The Robocorder has a dictionary (in both German & English) that can be used to generate robot vocals. The results were pretty interesting, but alas, during the evaluation my computer crashed due to a "serious error" and I quickly uninstalled it.


The VOKKO vocoder is actually the WINNER of the shootout. The GUI is good, it configures logically, and the sound is very intelligable. The feature set is great as well. You can use the onboard synth, onboard Soundfont player, or a mix of both as the carrier and use either an inputted audio signal or the onboard sample player as the modulator. Does it sound as good as the ELS vocoder? I don't know, but it sounds great, only costs $20 and is dongle-free.


As mentioned on the Boxsounds website, the Voctopus does not sound very good for vocals. It does however have a decent GUI and configures logically. Des not work for my vocoding needs - maybe it will work for yours...

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