ok, I have owned my Virus Indigo II for about 5 years, and I had never been able to get the vocoder to work well, but over the past week I have been researching, and remembering the few tid-bits of info I had gathered before, and I am now at the stage of having a pretty reasonable, and intelligable robot voice. Its not perfect yet, but I think thats now more down to me finding the right carrier, or to be more specific, of creating the right carrier.
Let me share what I DO know so far.
You need your mic to be pre-amped. I used the mic pre-amp on my MOTU Ultralite with a gain boost of 24dB.
You need to use another channel in Multi mode for your carrier synth (lets say, channel 2). Set the outputs of this to be Aux 1+2. You may also want to change the midi channel of this to the same channel you have your Vocoder patch on, so you can play the notes while displaying the controls for your vocoder.
In the FX edit page, on your Vocoder patch channel (say, channel 1), select the Vocoder MODE to be AUX 1+2 - the mode is where you select your carrier . Then select the vocoder input (the modulator) to be where you have routed your preamped mic output - IN L, for example. I also found that even with a pre-amped mic, it was a good idea to turn on the INPUT BOOST, and to turn the input gain up a bit. Oh, and you probably want dynamic setting on...
Once you've this done, you're halfway there.
Then, things to note, that aren't so well explained in the manual are: The filter balance should really be at 0 for classic vocoding. to the left will add unprocessed carrier, and to the right your voice. the middle is like a proper 'insert' fx type setting.
Be aware that selecting filter 1 allows you to control the carrier response, which is where you should mostly be. selecting filter 2 turns cutoff 1 to control of the modulator - this is usually less dramatic changes.
At the filter env, you really want 0 attack, a low decay setting, and release sets the amount of bands. I found 8 - 16 to be good, but it's really play around at this stage, and what I found great at this point was being able to go to the carrier channel, and flick though patches... some surprises there! .. some not so great, and in fact nothing that I am 100% blown away with, but I'm certainly getting places now. Had a pretty good Cylon going there!!
But I think now its just a matter of tuning, but as I say, I am getting results already.
This method kicks the arse off using the vocoder on one channel, I think - the reason ? There's no filters for the carrier in that mode, as the vocoder replaces them.
I hope somebody finds this a useful start, because I had done some much looking online for any help, and nobody seemed to be posting any, so I thought I'd do my bit!...
Anyone with any more advice, please chime in!!
