Now play a few different notes or a melody on the operator while the vocal is playing and you’ll hear what it does. Now change the Operator midi note to c1 which is much lower (2 octaves down) and you’ll hear the vocal change too). Then set the second drop down to Operator. Then go back to the vocoder unit and set the Carrier drop down to External. Vocoder settings – select ‘External’ as the Carrier then select the Operator channel in the second drop down box. You should now just hear the vocal with the vocoder on it. Mute the Operator channel by clicking on it’s channel number (we want it to play and affect the vocoder but we don’t want to hear it’s audio output directly. Play both channels and make sure they are both looping on 1 bar so the sound keeps playing and you can then hear your changes).
Then make the Operator plays a Square wave. We will add a new channel with an Operator, playing a long C3 note too, a one bar loop, similar to the midi clip as the sampler is playing – you can copy it over. Basic Operator settings – make sure to select a square wave – we used Sq16 Now we’re going to use a synth as a carrier in a more traditional way so you can see how the robot voice used by everyone from Kraftwerk to Daft Punk is created. It starts to show you what a vocoder can do. This effect is great, it is used a lot on techno vocals, especially pitched down. It sounds demonic and awesome! It will sound like this (this is just the vocal being vocoded with white noise)… The vocal is being vocoded with a Noise signal. Play it and listen to the vocal, it should sound like this (this is with no effects on it): Then make a midi not to play almost a whole bar at c3 (as in the image). So start off by adding this sample to a Sampler or Simpler in a new channel. We will do this step by step using modules that come with Ableton Live Suite and we’ll use a sample that comes with Ableton called ‘Vox Check It Out’. To get the classic robot vocoder sound you need a synth playing a square wave, a vocal track and a vocoder.
Lets start with an example of how to get those robot vocals… How Do You Vocoder Vocals? So the vocal is filtered in a harmonic way by the synth and you get that typical robot voice vocoder sound.Ī vocoder has many uses besides the robot voice by the way – you can process basslines and drums in harmonic ways using a vocoder. Then another signal, the carrier (lets say it’s a synth) is passed through the bands. The modulator (lets say it’s a vocal from a microphone) is split into bands on the filter bank. How A Vocoder WorksĪ vocoder has two signals, a modulator and a carrier. The Ableton vocoder is a versatile effects unit cable of doing the famous vocoder fx of old like the Kraftwerk / Daft Punk-esque ‘robot-voice’, and much more.