This TOTD is courtesy of Dietmar -Dietz- Tinhof and Ben Hall, who responded (along with others) to my plea for help in explaining the Vocorders. Thanks a million (or two) Ben & Dietz! :) BTW: The vocorders are an effect available on all Wavestations from EX upwards, and on 'Original' wavestations having had the Operating System Upgrade to v.3.19 installed within (a freebie).

The following is a enhanced version from what I [Dietz] wrote about the WS's Vocoder about one year ago ....]

V O C O D E R --- T I P o f t h e d a y ;-)

In a nutshell, a vocoder extracts amplitude-values inside a certain amount of narrow frequency-bands of an incoming signal (modulator) and tries to superimpose this set of ampitude-envelopes onto another signal, the carrier. Quality and charactor of the achieved effect is therefore a function of the harmonic contents of both signals, the number and position of the frequency-bands and the strength of the modulation.

All this is true for the WS-vocoder-FX. The different settings differ from each other both in quality and in the number of bands; one of the "small" and one of the "big" vocoder are optimized for speech (more freq.-bands in the middle of the frequency-spectrum), while the other ones are stretched throughout the whole range. Modulator and carrier are simply determined by the WS-bus-structure. The WS-AD can therefore vocode external signals.

The "Sibilance"-parameter allows you to add a certain hi-passed amount of the modulator-signal to the actual "vocoded" signal of the carrier to achieve a better (hah! :-) sibilance.

All other parameters (stereo-width etc) are not directly related to vocoding itself, but offer additional ways to process audio-material.

***

I almost never use the WS-Vocoder for those classical Robo-voices or Angelic choirs. What I _do_ is modulating one signal with another for the most diverse reasons, for example:

- modulating a synth pad by drums (kick, snare, hihat): Take a bright, but not too "obvious" pad, patch it as your carrier, connect an AUX-send of your mixer with the WS's audio-in and feed as much as you like from your drum-tracks as modulator;

- or take some white noise as carrier and try different modulator-sources for some quasi-distorted FX;

- a good source for strange guitar-FX is modulating a heavily distorted guitar-chord by some filter-sweeping synth-lines (although this will steal some of the "heavyness" of your guitar);

- a good starter for Robo-voices are simple, bright carrieres like triangle- or sawtooth-sounds. Play one static note on the lower end of your manual (or two dissonant ones in a distance of more than one octave) and feed your voice (or a sample) as modulator. Be aware that it's not only the _sound_ which makes your Robo real, it's more often the tempo and the pronounciation that makes R2D2 come to life ... should I call it "the human factor" ;-) ...

.... just a few inputs from my the bottom of my workbox :-)

Dietz

Dietmar -Dietz- Tinhof Music-SoundEngineering-SoundDesign -!-T-H-E--M-O-S-T--C-O-L-O-U-R-F-U-L--P-L-A-C-E--O-N--W-W-W-!- http://www.atnet.at/club/dietz

To which Ben Hall expands with another example:

Basically, you are superimposing the timbral changes of one sound (the "modulator") onto another sound (the "carrier")

Hence, select a pad sound, preferably one with a decent range of frequencies, like a breathy vocal pad. Then take a percussive rhythmic wave sequence. Assign the first to bus A, and the second to bus B. Then on the vocoder effects page, set the carrier to bus A (the pad) and the modulator to bus B (the wave sequence). Now when you play, you hear the pad being frequency modulated with the wave sequence. The sibilance affects how much hi frequency content of the modulator gets through. The different vocoder effects (1, 2, 3 and 4) affect different frequency ranges - details are in the EX addendum.