Robots that can talk. Basslines that talk. These are some of the magical possibilities when you start fucking with a vocoder. And to help you to make it sound like you’re collabing with Stephen Hawkings on vocals, we’ve put together an exquisite list of both premium and free vocoder vst plug-ins for you to grind your teeth on. Woop woop!
They have both a talk box and a vocoder VST plugin in that pack there. I tried out the talk box - it sounds awesome! Way better than the Fruity Vocoder I was using before.
Fun Fact: The Vocoder was invented by Homer Dudley at Bell Laboratories in the mid-30’s of the last century. Tasty!
First, let’s mention the premium plug-ins, as these are generally the best in terms of sound quality. In no particular order, I bring to you:
1. Vocodex By Image-Line(Windows)
The makers of FL Studio have an absolute banger of a vocoder plug-in – Vocodex. The mighty AEPH reveals in a recent interview on BassGorilla.com that he often uses Vocodex on basslines created in Native Instruments Massive, for a more vocalized and fatter bass sound. This is one of the most powerful plugins in this article in terms of features, and has an excellent reputation for the quality of sound you can get out of it.
Key features include a soundgoodizer for warm output and limiting, up to 100 bands, sidechain carrier and / or modulator input, speech enhancement contouring, noise reduction and voice doubling.
2. Vocalizer By Sonivox(Windows)
Vocalizer is both an instrument and a processor. It comes with four spectral synthesis modules that can be routed into each other in any number of crazy ways.
Key features: formant shifting (creates some very unique sounds), over 16 filter configurations, 16 spectral synthesis types.
3. Matrix 2 By Virsyn(Mac & Windows)
This follow up to version one by software makers Virsyn features a 2nd Tone generator for improved speech intelligibility, an LFO for vibrato generation with optional mod wheel control, an improved pitch follower from version 1, 2 new filters, a redesigned interface and is now available for Mac OS X as a 64-bit plug-in.
4. Robotronic By Sugar Bytes(Mac & Windows)
Robotronic is a great sounding and easy to use vocoder which can process mono and stereo input signals, includes sampler and synthesizer and contains quite useful features like Frequency Focusing and Formant Shifting.
5. TAL-Vocoder by Togu Audio Line (Mac & Windows)
TAL-Vocoder is a vintage vocoder emulation with 11 bands that emulates the sound of vocoders from the early 80’s. This vocoder is optimized for voice processing and includes some algorithms for consonants to make the voice more intelligible. The carrier signal is a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) with a Pulse, Saw, Noise and SubOsc. Key features:
6. Talkbox by mda (Mac & Windows)
MDA has an impressive 25 free plug-ins that you can download as one bundle for Mac or Windows, and the Talkbox is one of the plugins included with this bundle. Talkbox is a high resolution (albeit pretty simple) vocoder. It is not a feature-rich plug-in, but you can get some great sounds out of it if you experiment, and it is useful to have this in your artillery if you like to use a range of vocoders on different vocal samples or bass sounds for example. It gives a more natural and less electronic sound than other vocoders mentioned here.
7. Vocovee by g200kg(Windows)
Vocovee is the VST ‘Effect’ version of the VOCOV Vocoder. It doesn’t allow sidechain vocoding, but can do low latency vocoding. It is worth using this instead of Vocov if you need real-time vocoding. Vocovee has a improved built-in synth.
….aaaaannnnd, why not one more for good measure….
8. Sonicism vintage vocoder DX(Windows)
/easy-auto-tune-app.html. This vocoder is a DirectX plugin. You can use it in Wavosaur with a VST-DX wrapper, such as ffx4 by VB Audio.
Thanks for reading this and if you know any other great vocoder plugins, leave a comment!
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