Carriers are tricky beasts to program. My suggestion is to make sure your carrier wave contains a broad range of frequencies. If you try to use a bass sound with the low pass filter turned way down, you are only going to hear bass-y frequencies. If you're trying to use your own voice as the modulator, you're generally going to find the output quite muddy and difficult to understand.
Try building a simple carrier sound with osc 1, 2, and the sub-osc. Set them to sawtooth or whatever. Put sub-osc at about 50% mix. Make sure your filter is opened all the way up. Apply some Hard Filter Saturation (the Edit menu on the filter section). Apply some Hard distortion in the effects section.
Set your amp envelope to A=0, D=0, S=max, R=0
Filter envelope doesn't really matter, just make sure that the Envelope Amount in the filter section is set to 0.
Ok great, so now we have a really horrible, abrasive, nasty sound - but it should hopefully contain a nice broad range of frequencies. Use this as a template for your carrier, then try experiment a bit with different changes :>
If you write a really nice vocoder carrier but the voice output is still quite hard to understand, try adding some Noise from the noise generator.
Generally, difficulty understanding the voice = some frequencies are poorly represented in your carrier wave.
On drums as a modulator source,
Try adding some extreme compression to the modulator signal before it enters the vocoder.
Also when writing a drum riff, I strongly suggest to not use loops, and to just dial in single-hit drums manually. Experiment with each different drum sound, figure out what it sounds like, then arrange the different sounds in your head into a riff. The best riffs for drum modulator imho are fairly simple..
I haven't used the Virus vocoder at all yet, to be honest with you =P I will give it a try at some point but apparently it's quite hard to get a good sound from it. I have to say I'm quite excited by the idea of things like using the input level (of the modulator) to modulate the cutoff of the carrier...
The MS2000's vocoder is 16 band. It's pretty good..
The vocoder is Reason is awesome. I found it very powerful and flexible.
-Annikk
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