Vocoders are so awesome, but they are rarely used to full advantage. Everyone immediately goes for the robot voice thing, which is cool and all, but hardly the most creative use of these devices. It's kind of like using a sampler to only play songs using a dog barking or something. You can get more interesting results when you start running guitars or anything other than a voice through them. I remember my music collaborator and I using a PAIA vocoder in the early 90s where we used a guitar as the carrier, and a sequence from an Ensoniq EPS as the modulator. It turned the guitar into an otherworldly gurgling, bubbling water sound.
Totally agree. 👍👍👍 I was honestly a bit surprised when I noticed that most people thought that putting drums, guitar, etc thru it was a new thing. I’ve always had two things I tell people who just started and wants new inspiring gears: Get a reverb/echo. And get a vocoder. -And experiment!
I built the Paia vocoder... sitting on a rack in my garage gathering dust. I should go rescue it and see if it still works - it actually never worked all that well; I remember being slightly disappointed after I finished it - it didn't perform as well as I had dreamed. The ETI sounds like I wanted the Paia to sound.
Good old ETI. I built several kits. I built the ETI 480 50watt amplifier as my first guitar amp, and a little 5watt one as a practice amp. Used it for years.
I built the ETI 499 amplifier - and I also built the Electronics Australia Playmaster 3. I ended up with 4 of them in a surround sound setup. They were all good.
I read the first article on the ETI vocoder and desperately wanted to build one. However, I had several things working against me. Firstly, I was still at school at the time with only my allowances to save up from. Secondly, I lived (and still live) in Denmark, and electronic components were hard to come by. Thirdly, I never got my hands on the issue holding the second article in the series, and when I finally managed to track down a copy of it, ETI had gone out of business! However, I did learn a lot about the inner workings of a vocoder by studying that article. Thanks for sharing this!
While it was an expensive project back in 1980 (£175 in 1980 is about £1000 today!) I had a friend who played keyboards and other electronic instruments and he had had it demoed to him at a show and thought it was a bargain, a commercial instrument of similar quality would be 3 or 4 times that. Powertran produced some amazing products, I only wish I had the money and skill at the time to build one or two of them!
yeah, as much as I love all the FPGA and SoC systems we have today and the projects people build off them, I kinda miss this style of kit. tindie has some, but what I wouldn't give for someone to reboot the old heathkit kits or stuff like this.
There's somebody from Kazakhstan, on MW forum, who's selling unpopulated PCBs to make a clone of an old German (I think) vocoder... there are projects like that, but I don't know of an affordable convenient kit?
Julian Ilett built a copy of this a few years ago. You can still get all the components and have the PCBs made, th-cam.com/play/PLjzGSu1yGFjXKZ5igKxwlgfGdy25yZoPN.html
@10:00 putting drums through a vocoder 🤔😲 not sure why I never thought of that. I've been trying to build more musical / but percussive drum sounds. That's exactly what I need!
I used to talk to his brother John Becker about this back in 2003 when I worked at Essex Radio in charge of Engineering. John used to live in Kent at the time but travel down to another electronics magazine.... This was a great product and later In the 1980's they issued I am sure some mods to that project with values etc...... I will try to visit your musium one day as when I left school in 1981 I worked on ZX81's BBC Micros and a host of other computers repairing them as my first job....and at Amstrad.
That trip through the magazine was a nostalgia fix! My grandad had a ZX80, and he also built the Maplin organ, which I remember playing when I visited. My first job after leaving uni was actually in Maplin Electronics in Southampton as well :) I spent a couple of years there before starting a career in software. It was quite instructive, and my staff discount was handy for getting and building kits now and then too.
Amazing. I don't do synths, or vocoders, and I'm terrible on my guitar (though I still like to pluck the strings). But I love your channel. The energy you put into these videos and knowledge you drop is just perfection. Thank you!
C;lassic kit and lots of memories in those mags. We built a comp80 at school, and I had fun secretly patching CP/M to behave a little differently, ZX80 kit as my first computer, and was really keen on the transcendent 2000. Still got an original demo tape for it somewhere.
What a cracking bit of kit. My vocoder is part of my DAW and I dont use it much but I will have a play around with it. A stand alone one would be very cool. Actually thinking about it I do have a Behringer vocoder somewhere in the shed. I will have to dig it out!
That sounds amazing! Very Battlestar Galactica Cylons ^___^ (Well they used an EMS 1000 for that so no wonder it sounds very close). I think the 14 or 16 band Vocoders sound the best. I love these things. That patch at 16:00 sounded awesome too! Very Daft Punk I thought. ^^
Since watching BattleStar Galactica in the late 70s I wanted a vocoder. The sound of the Cylons - Awesome! They were used so much during those early years, defined a lot of music of the day. Love it! Vocoder'tastic!
Neal Armstrong was a big synthesiser user, he loved the echo you got in space, apparently it was out of this world (echo in a vacuum🤣😂) Interesting vocoder 2x👍
I loved ETI - was fascinated by the Vocoder but could never afford to build it (not that I have any musical talent to use it with!). It was an interesting to compare the design of this vocoder with the Elektor vocoder which came out earlier the same year but which had fewer channels.
I have always wanted a vocoder. Kenny Everett was the Genius when it came to vocoders. He sung my name jingles for radio with a vocoder back in the 70's Plug a keyboard in to it to play chords with the vocal.
He'd sing whole choirs with them, and use video feedback as well when he made it to the telly. But never forget the BBC radiophonic workshop. EXTERMINATE!!!!
I want my voice to sound like this all the time. I wonder if I can have one surgically installed. Then instead of speaking normally, when people say "Some weather we're having eh?" I can say things like "Atmospheric conditions are adequate to maintain peak performance on all my systems.". Or "This food is good." "Thank you for the information fellow human. I also intake dead bio matter in a disgusting process of digestion instead of more efficiently recharging like a higher life form would."
I just had a VOCASIM!!!!!! OMG!!! You just brought back so great memories.... but you REALLY TICKLED MY PICKLE with that vocoded b-line!!! - You BETTER make a dope ass track with that and POST IT ON YT!!! HAHA!!!! LUV YA M8!!!!!
The Buchla module 296t is coming to eurorack from Tiptop soon and i have seen others (even a kit version, bt i cannot now remember the manufacturer), so if someone likes this vocoder and cannot get this particular one, those are an alternative.
I really like how Powertran used the KLF font. hadn't noticed that until now and as a synth nerd who is obsessed with the KLF I'm rather disappointed in myself.
nowhere near your level but i found running a mic into an overdrive pedal allowed me to use my voice for heavy metal sounding power chords. That was kinda cool so i got a bowie stylaphone and a gen x1 stylaphone and a few mic input splitters then plugged them all in together in series, then got some ever more interesting cool sounds as the input splitter let me plug a guitar in too.. and the x1 allowed you to feed audio into it too which it was able to do synth things too. Thats probably the functions of two of your basic modules and you have walls of hundreds of them. You must have fun making wierd sounds
Man, that thing sounds great! I built a PAIA vocoder when I was a kid, and I never could make it sound good. The filters really kind of sucked, IMHO. Needs a sharper Q? Or more stages? Dunno what the secret is. I also tried building one in Pure Data, and could never get that Phat Sound!
I really enjoyed this one ! Just past 14 minutes I thought you were about to go into DALEK mode. :-) I remember them when they first came out, ( black and white ). While I'm here, Just wondered if you'd had time to do a bit of tuning on the organ ? ps, I still play around with my old Echoman EM150 analogue echo unit, good fun. Take care and keep it up
I'm quite impressed by how good this thing sounded, for what it was! I seem to remember that some vocoders had a sibilance detector that would switch the source to noise when activated. Was that the case here? I didn't quite follow that part, sorry.
Quickly, watching this video, the memory of this song came to my head like a punch... Beastie Boys - Intergalactic, could you do a version of the theme with it?
In each filter band, is the voice element the control or the input to the VCA? The article initial text indicated it is the control, but later explanation was the other way around. Which is it? Also, thank you for the detailed description and walk through, learning a lot!
In actual fact it can work either way round. But look at the block diagram cv comes from excitation. In the end it would work like a four quadrant multiplier so similar results either way
Vocoders are so awesome, but they are rarely used to full advantage. Everyone immediately goes for the robot voice thing, which is cool and all, but hardly the most creative use of these devices. It's kind of like using a sampler to only play songs using a dog barking or something. You can get more interesting results when you start running guitars or anything other than a voice through them. I remember my music collaborator and I using a PAIA vocoder in the early 90s where we used a guitar as the carrier, and a sequence from an Ensoniq EPS as the modulator. It turned the guitar into an otherworldly gurgling, bubbling water sound.
Totally agree. 👍👍👍
I was honestly a bit surprised when I noticed that most people thought that putting drums, guitar, etc thru it was a new thing.
I’ve always had two things I tell people who just started and wants new inspiring gears: Get a reverb/echo. And get a vocoder. -And experiment!
The drum machine + poly synth combo was glorious
I want more of the toilet roll song! It's sounds really flush!
Sounds flush! 🤣🤣🤣
Richard Becker and his wife owned Powertran. Elektor magazine also published a Vocoder design.
Indeed; I worked for them for 3 months.
I built the Paia vocoder... sitting on a rack in my garage gathering dust. I should go rescue it and see if it still works - it actually never worked all that well; I remember being slightly disappointed after I finished it - it didn't perform as well as I had dreamed. The ETI sounds like I wanted the Paia to sound.
Good old ETI. I built several kits. I built the ETI 480 50watt amplifier as my first guitar amp, and a little 5watt one as a practice amp. Used it for years.
I built the ETI 499 amplifier - and I also built the Electronics Australia Playmaster 3. I ended up with 4 of them in a surround sound setup. They were all good.
I read the first article on the ETI vocoder and desperately wanted to build one. However, I had several things working against me. Firstly, I was still at school at the time with only my allowances to save up from. Secondly, I lived (and still live) in Denmark, and electronic components were hard to come by. Thirdly, I never got my hands on the issue holding the second article in the series, and when I finally managed to track down a copy of it, ETI had gone out of business! However, I did learn a lot about the inner workings of a vocoder by studying that article. Thanks for sharing this!
Love the 70's fro and stache. You were really, groovin', man. Right on! Solid and outta site!
While it was an expensive project back in 1980 (£175 in 1980 is about £1000 today!) I had a friend who played keyboards and other electronic instruments and he had had it demoed to him at a show and thought it was a bargain, a commercial instrument of similar quality would be 3 or 4 times that. Powertran produced some amazing products, I only wish I had the money and skill at the time to build one or two of them!
If that was a Georgio Moroder impression at 10:55 you nailed it my friend 😅
What an awesome and versatile machine!!
Watched this entire video with a huge grin on my face. Brilliant!
Love your enthusiasm in everything you do.Big love my good Sir.
Man I wish there was a diy kit made today of this.
yeah, as much as I love all the FPGA and SoC systems we have today and the projects people build off them, I kinda miss this style of kit. tindie has some, but what I wouldn't give for someone to reboot the old heathkit kits or stuff like this.
There's somebody from Kazakhstan, on MW forum, who's selling unpopulated PCBs to make a clone of an old German (I think) vocoder... there are projects like that, but I don't know of an affordable convenient kit?
Julian Ilett built a copy of this a few years ago. You can still get all the components and have the PCBs made, th-cam.com/play/PLjzGSu1yGFjXKZ5igKxwlgfGdy25yZoPN.html
Yes please 😁
I saw the responses. To bad that TH-cam doesn’t allow links…
@@GizzyDillespee What is the MW forum? Can you drop some links here so I can find what you're referring to?
@10:00 putting drums through a vocoder 🤔😲 not sure why I never thought of that. I've been trying to build more musical / but percussive drum sounds. That's exactly what I need!
I used to talk to his brother John Becker about this back in 2003 when I worked at Essex Radio in charge of Engineering. John used to live in Kent at the time but travel down to another electronics magazine.... This was a great product and later In the 1980's they issued I am sure some mods to that project with values etc...... I will try to visit your musium one day as when I left school in 1981 I worked on ZX81's BBC Micros and a host of other computers repairing them as my first job....and at Amstrad.
I miss the electronics magazines. Used to waste a lot of time drooling over the adverts.
That trip through the magazine was a nostalgia fix! My grandad had a ZX80, and he also built the Maplin organ, which I remember playing when I visited. My first job after leaving uni was actually in Maplin Electronics in Southampton as well :) I spent a couple of years there before starting a career in software. It was quite instructive, and my staff discount was handy for getting and building kits now and then too.
Amazing. I don't do synths, or vocoders, and I'm terrible on my guitar (though I still like to pluck the strings). But I love your channel. The energy you put into these videos and knowledge you drop is just perfection. Thank you!
Dude it doesn't matter how good you are as long as you have fun and enjoy doing it keep on keeping on!
I don't play anything.. I love music and electronics so I've been working on a project for my friends.
That last jam vocoding the bassline was badass. You should build a whole song around that.
Thanks
I love how much fun you clearly had making this video. Couldn't stop chuckling
I really appreciate the synth patch walkthrough on the Furby machine.
C;lassic kit and lots of memories in those mags. We built a comp80 at school, and I had fun secretly patching CP/M to behave a little differently, ZX80 kit as my first computer, and was really keen on the transcendent 2000. Still got an original demo tape for it somewhere.
@8:09 that classic basic basic vocoder noise. Very cool just by itself. 🔥
😍
That sounds awesome with the drum machine running though it!
Sam! Brilliant and hilarious as ever! Keep up the good work mate! 🙂
What a cracking bit of kit. My vocoder is part of my DAW and I dont use it much but I will have a play around with it. A stand alone one would be very cool. Actually thinking about it I do have a Behringer vocoder somewhere in the shed. I will have to dig it out!
10:43 channeling Giorgio Moroder, I LOVE it!😅
Sam, you are a treasure.
Well done. A great demo of the Vocoder. Sounds like you had great fun playing with it.
I love seeing all these old synths and the building processes but I’ve never wanted any of them like I’ve wanted this vocoder❤️❤️
Gorgeous typesetting in that magazine. We used to do it up nice.
I love this thing! So did one of my favorite bands, ELO. 🎶Mister Blue Sky! 🎶
That sounds amazing! Very Battlestar Galactica Cylons ^___^ (Well they used an EMS 1000 for that so no wonder it sounds very close). I think the 14 or 16 band Vocoders sound the best. I love these things. That patch at 16:00 sounded awesome too! Very Daft Punk I thought. ^^
This is the best sounding vocoder I have ever heard. The digital vocoder plugins don't sound nearly as dirty/grungy as this one.
You just need to run a dirtier carrier signal into them. Should get you into the ballpark more?
@@BatteryCoverMissing yeah, it sounds distorted at both ends. Really unique
That actually sounds amazing.
Since watching BattleStar Galactica in the late 70s I wanted a vocoder. The sound of the Cylons - Awesome!
They were used so much during those early years, defined a lot of music of the day.
Love it!
Vocoder'tastic!
And cheaper than the ARP 2500 synthesizer they used.
Battlestar Galactica. I thought the same thing.
dude vocoders are SICK AND THIS IS COOL ANDTHANKS
Neal Armstrong was a big synthesiser user, he loved the echo you got in space, apparently it was out of this world (echo in a vacuum🤣😂)
Interesting vocoder 2x👍
In space, no one can hear you scream...
@@mediaphile In the Nevada desert at night with a synthesiser you can pretend you are on the moon!
His nightclub was awful though,. No atmosphere.
I dunno how you knew I wasn't deserving of all those bog rolls, but you nailed it.
I sold mine 8 years ago, great sounding processor
Your seventies twin DEFINITELY needs more screen time :D.
Thanks so much for going into the theory of how these things work! Very interesting! 🎤
I love the giant turny knobs, straight out of some Frankenstein movie or Batman computer.
I loved ETI - was fascinated by the Vocoder but could never afford to build it (not that I have any musical talent to use it with!). It was an interesting to compare the design of this vocoder with the Elektor vocoder which came out earlier the same year but which had fewer channels.
I have always wanted a vocoder. Kenny Everett was the Genius when it came to vocoders.
He sung my name jingles for radio with a vocoder back in the 70's
Plug a keyboard in to it to play chords with the vocal.
He'd sing whole choirs with them, and use video feedback as well when he made it to the telly. But never forget the BBC radiophonic workshop. EXTERMINATE!!!!
I really enjoyed the impromptu jams XD
Wow it's quite versatile. I want one!
Wow that is really good. Sounds as good as the EMS!
Sounds wicked! Kudos
I remember seeing this, I had the magazines for the PA stuff but could never afford their kits, their synths were awesome
I want my voice to sound like this all the time. I wonder if I can have one surgically installed. Then instead of speaking normally, when people say "Some weather we're having eh?" I can say things like "Atmospheric conditions are adequate to maintain peak performance on all my systems.". Or "This food is good." "Thank you for the information fellow human. I also intake dead bio matter in a disgusting process of digestion instead of more efficiently recharging like a higher life form would."
I like the 4 little circuit diagram dudes hanging out at 4:32 :ø
Very cool piece of kit and history.
I just had a VOCASIM!!!!!! OMG!!! You just brought back so great memories.... but you REALLY TICKLED MY PICKLE with that vocoded b-line!!! - You BETTER make a dope ass track with that and POST IT ON YT!!! HAHA!!!! LUV YA M8!!!!!
The TH-cam caption generator as a vocoder decoder was un-phased up until the load of Toilet Roll Mumbo Jumbo Song.
is that a bosa NOva @9:50 I do like that set up Would be cool to hear a nice modern beat morph into the vintage lo-fi sound.
omg you build the vocoder julian ilett is buildung for what feels like 10 years
The Buchla module 296t is coming to eurorack from Tiptop soon and i have seen others (even a kit version, bt i cannot now remember the manufacturer), so if someone likes this vocoder and cannot get this particular one, those are an alternative.
I really like how Powertran used the KLF font. hadn't noticed that until now and as a synth nerd who is obsessed with the KLF I'm rather disappointed in myself.
Awesome, never heard of this one.
Ooh, getting Astro Blaster vibes from parts of this! "Alert, Alert. Invader in Sector 1, Player 1 to battle stations!" God, I'm old... 😁
nowhere near your level but i found running a mic into an overdrive pedal allowed me to use my voice for heavy metal sounding power chords. That was kinda cool so i got a bowie stylaphone and a gen x1 stylaphone and a few mic input splitters then plugged them all in together in series, then got some ever more interesting cool sounds as the input splitter let me plug a guitar in too.. and the x1 allowed you to feed audio into it too which it was able to do synth things too. Thats probably the functions of two of your basic modules and you have walls of hundreds of them. You must have fun making wierd sounds
Cool! Has a KMFDM vibe to the voice. Awesome! Also makes me think Beastie Boys as well.
Man, that thing sounds great! I built a PAIA vocoder when I was a kid, and I never could make it sound good. The filters really kind of sucked, IMHO. Needs a sharper Q? Or more stages? Dunno what the secret is. I also tried building one in Pure Data, and could never get that Phat Sound!
That was really cool. Thanks for sharing it!
6:45 Cat was laying relaxed but is now looking at Me in confusion looking like He is thinking "What the fxxx is that sound?".
I really enjoyed this one ! Just past 14 minutes I thought you were about to go into DALEK mode. :-) I remember them when they first came out, ( black and white ). While I'm here, Just wondered if you'd had time to do a bit of tuning on the organ ? ps, I still play around with my old Echoman EM150 analogue echo unit, good fun. Take care and keep it up
What does a harmonica thru a vocoder sound like?
you basically made an early Boys Noize track there in the end :P great work!
Hello just a heads up Julian Ilett of the Julian Ilett TH-cam channel is building one from scratch
Brilliant video cheers 👍😃😎🤘
Classic!!! How many were started to be built and was never completed? Heaps!
A vocoder was used in the SIGSALY system during WW2 for secure, encrypted communication.
Hitting my ears like Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys
16:35 when you're calling tech support but you are on hold for an hour
Remember Sam... the difference between 70s Sam and 80s Sam is a pair of aviator sunglasses. 😁 That is a great little vocoder. 👍
By your command, imperious leader!
Sam nice documentacion
I'm quite impressed by how good this thing sounded, for what it was! I seem to remember that some vocoders had a sibilance detector that would switch the source to noise when activated. Was that the case here? I didn't quite follow that part, sorry.
This episode was freaking awesome! Need more vocoder music :)
So used for the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica and the intro for Night Flight to Venus by Boney M?
Pretty rad 😎
Cool Dalek voice🪠
Quickly, watching this video, the memory of this song came to my head like a punch... Beastie Boys - Intergalactic, could you do a version of the theme with it?
Diggin' the 80's dress up----Although you look like one of the Scousers off Harry Enfields show lolololo!
In each filter band, is the voice element the control or the input to the VCA? The article initial text indicated it is the control, but later explanation was the other way around. Which is it?
Also, thank you for the detailed description and walk through, learning a lot!
In actual fact it can work either way round. But look at the block diagram cv comes from excitation. In the end it would work like a four quadrant multiplier so similar results either way
Regarding the vca that is
Hope to see you in bgt
You should have seen my cats react when he hears that voco-delay The first time 😳😂
That Digital Delay looks decent
its a cybotron from battlestar galactica. all us oldies know that. really cool.
Which setting is more fun, Cyberman or Dalek?
Going to build one of these from scratch …
3:00 The Smash Aliens called - they want their colleague back!
Hearing you use this thing, it makes me wonder if that's what they used for the Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica TV program.
Is that shirt a Todd Rundgren reference?
What's a trade name of this magazine holder/binder ?
Why the hell did I recall the scene from Monty Pythons meaning of Life, when I heard words "juices flowing"? Roughly at 13:15
YOU HAVE A VOCODER, HOLY SHIT!
Great ! We need more Robot Voice !!