Robotic

Is there a way to record your voice in a robotic style reminiscent of the electro days?

You are probably thinking about effects like the voice in intergalactic from the beastie boys and that is the talkbox function of a synthesizer, which is not doable with a mpc..

Edit: doable, but you need additional hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQFj2u ... f9NFIMATnq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc3c8rl ... y9I94ChuDU

Use a vocoder plug-in in your daw

If you want hardware outside the DAW, you can use this:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... ynthesizer

The original way of doing this was either a vocoder or a talkbox. Then autotune did something kind of similar (not really if you really dig the original sound).

Vocoders split the voice into bands across a spectrum, takes the levels of each band and applies that to bandpass filters applied to a second signal. There are quite a few software vocoders now. I have Vocodex (The microfreak has one built in, but I've still not got around to using it. SoftTube has a decent one too. The softube was heavily discounted last Black Friday. Tal have a free one, so probably worth starting there before investing any cash.

https://tal-software.com/products/tal-vocoder

A talkbox feeds your sound source down a tube and into your mouth where the shape of you mouth applies the vowel shape to the audio being played in your mouth, and the picked up by a microphone. MXR make a decent one for about 200 quid, and if your in Europe Thoman make one for about half the price

https://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_talk_box.htm

I have this one, but there is a fair amount of technique involved and as ideal you want to sing would sounding the vowels but making the shape, whilst sounding the consonants. The learning curve involves a fair amount of dribbling. (I taken a break from it as I'm currently behind bars serving a two years sentence from my Orthodontist).

If you really get into the sound another to investigate is Izotopes Vocal synth 2. which includes and 5 engines, including a vocoder and a talkbox emulation, which you blend together. This was heavily reduced last black friday on pluginboutique, so I'd keep an eye out in sales, instead of full price.

Andy better pay Blezz to Bless him with the MPC standalone version



https://www.blezzbeats.com/vocodine
Works in NI stuff Akai your move!

Roland E-4

Akai should definitely have one in their "Vocal" plugins section

Something a little different is Text to Voice function in Vital Synth. You get to try it out in the free version, but is limited to a small number a day. The free synth is worth getting anyway. I have the full version which allows more experimentation with accents. Basically you type in a phrase (which needs to be short other wise the quality is degraded as the sample of the wavetable is a fixed length), choose an accent and the phrases is generated by a third party language site (hence it's not available for free and part of the full versions price), which is then converted to a wave table. You then apply am envelope to scan the wavetable. You can adjust the envelope to make it fit rhythmically. You can't really make it sing as such, but it's very playable harmonically. makes nice chordal phrases. You can apply 2 modulators, so a Vododer and a Formant help tune in the sound. I really like this option alongside the vocoder and talkbox, because it doesn't really on your voice or a performer, and the accents give nice different vibe to each phrase. Sometime you have to fudge the spelling of the phrases to suit different accents to make them intelligible, hence the full version is really needed.

Thanks for all your comments

I'm actually a little blown away that there's no vocoder (or talkbox) effect on the MPC at this point. Hell, even Propellerhead Reason had a decent vocoder effect over 20 years ago (BV512).

Here is a free vocoder vst for computer if you decide you wanna try something like that out. I love these tal plugins. https://tal-software.com/products/tal-vocoder