 So yes, the Microfreak now has a vocoder mode. Arturia were kind enough to send across this rather nifty white vocoder edition Microfreak which comes packaged with this handy Gooseneck microphone, but the good news is that the vocoder capabilities are all packaged up as a firmware update. So if you have a normal Microfreak you will be getting the vocoder as well. You also don't need to use this particular microphone and we'll take a look later on in the video at setting up other microphones to use with the vocoder as well. So in this short video we will take a look at setting up the vocoder. So setting up the microphone whether it's this one that comes with the vocoder edition or another microphone. We'll take a look at the various parameters that are available to us and talk about how a vocoder works, explore some of those sounds, and also look at running things other than our voice through a vocoder as well because that's kind of fun as well. So to make use of the vocoder once you have installed the new firmware you're going to want to cross to initialize patch and you want to scroll your type knob all way across till we see vocoder. Now if you're not using the microphone that comes with the vocoder edition or if you're using an external source when you do this it might say warning microquired and it won't let you actually come into the vocoder setting. I'll show you how to get around with that in just a second when we come into the utility menu because the next thing you want to do is make sure that you have enough gain in order to make everything work. So if we go into the utility menu and once you've installed the new firmware upgrade you'll now have an item in here called mic settings. So if we go into mic settings we have settings for mic gain, a noise gate and mic detection. Now if you were getting the error message saying warning microphone should be connected that's probably because the connection that you're using to get in to the microfreak is not the same as this microphone uses and if you go in here and you turn that off that should solve that problem. I'll leave it on for a second because I'm using this one. So mic gain is probably the most important thing here. Out of the factory this is set all the way down at minus 12 and you won't hear anything like that's nowhere near enough gain to actually make any noise through the vocoder so you'll be playing and you'll be tapping and talking and there'll be nothing coming out. I found that for this microphone around 40 decibels is about right that was what I was using on the intro so that's all used here but it goes up quite a way so if you have like a dynamic microphone that needs a lot of gain for example you can apply a fair amount of gain to it right at the end there we have auto gain which works okay I found it was a little bit low with this one I don't know it might be okay I'm gonna hear me there so it's quite a fair bit of gain but yeah like you can see I'm not knowing near the microphone now and there's enough gain here for it to be picking me up in the room which is pretty useful if you want to talk for a while anyway about 40 seems to work well when you're close up to it much higher in it sort of clips and we also have a noise gate here which allows us to apply a noise gate so if you do have things with a very high gain and you want to make sure you're not picking up any noise in the room you can set a threshold here but I'm just gonna leave that off for the purposes of this video so the microphone itself actually plugs into the headphone inputs I'll just yank that out for a second the microphone that comes with the vocoder edition has a headphone input here so you're getting both the microphone and the headphone it's molded to fit around the back here but what I would say is if you're using this one just make sure you are actually pushing it all the way in and it's square because a couple of times I thought it wasn't working and the reason was it it just wasn't plugged all the way in so do actually make sure you plug the microphone all the way in seems obvious but it's not always clear because the way this is molded if you can see you might not be able to quite see that but this connection is a tip ring ring sleeve connection which is the same sort of thing you get with the headsets so this is a jack from a headset adapter so this allows you to plug in a headphone and a microphone the sort of thing that you might want to do if you have something like this which is a gaming headset which in this case has separate connectors for microphone and headphones I'm sure a lot of us are working from home at the moment so these are more commonplace in our homes than maybe they were before so in this case it's quite easy for me to take the microphone there and the headphone there and stick them in the back here and this will work just as well when I talk through the microphone on this headset and that's what we'll use for the rest of the video so that you're not constantly looking at my head of my head encroaching in the frame and this kind of adapter is also really useful if you want to get other sources into the microphone so let's take a look at these controls and to understand what they're doing we need to think a little bit about how a vocoder a musical vocoder actually operates so what a vocoder is doing is it's taking one input usually a voice but it doesn't have to be and splitting cut into frequency bands basically putting a bunch of band pass filters across that sound at different frequencies and then what it's going to do for each of those bands is watch the level so if we split my voice up into multiple bands and I go there's going to be different profile of which bands are most strongly affected there as opposed to when I go okay so we've basically got envelope follows across each of those bands so we then have another sound source usually a synthesizer sound and we're going to put a bunch of band pass filters across all of those but now instead of listening to each of those bands what we're going to do is open the level of those bands up so each of the bands from the incoming signal is going to be affecting each of the bands from the synthesized or carrier signal so that carrier signal is what we're talking about on the wave control so when I'm talking now with the up turn this down with the wave control turned all the way down the waveform that is being vocoded is a sawtooth wave as we turn it up it becomes a pulse width with a variable pulse width so essentially we've got pulse width modulation which will make nick bat very very happy indeed and right about the top we start using noise instead of a harmonic wave which sounds very very spooky indeed yes very spooky so this next knob the timbre knob is called shift so when we were thinking about our band pass filters I'll stop talking for the vocode for a second when we was thinking about our band pass filters before we had multiple band pass filters and with the shift knob in the middle what's essentially happening is that we have sort of twin band pass filters so if I have one band pass filter at 200 hertz there'll be one on the carrier signal at 200 hertz there's one at 500 hertz but one at 500 hertz so everything sort of lines up which is why as far as natural goes the sound here sounds fairly naturally matches the general timbre of my voice but as we turn the knob up or down we're going to shift that second set of filters so they're not corresponding with the input signal which is going to give the effect of making things sound kind of deeper or more muffled or as we go further up everything's going to sound kind of chip monkey and sped up even though it's not sped up the transfer of the different frequencies has been shifted around hence shift so the final knob the shape knob is labeled bandwidth and this is going to affect the bandwidth of the filters on the carrier wave our synthesized wave so as we turn it up it's going to open up those filters and it's going to probably be the most natural sounding and legible usually version of the sound as I turn it down it's going to tighten things up and things are going to get a little bit more synthetic and as we tighten the bandwidth we're also increasing the resonance which is going to start to introduce a very cool kind of ringing as the filters start resonating and then right down at the bottom you can hear that they're really ringing out and you can kind of play the pitch even with the noise with the shift knob now and then right down at the bottom as we get down to the bottom we can hear that we have this wonderful ringing quality and this is going to create a very very very very very synthetic sound with a lovely resonance try to stop yourself singing when you're playing a vocoder yes yes wonderful so one of the best features of the microphone for me is the mod matrix so let's just try playing some modulation to some of these sounds here so probably the most obvious one for me would be to um apply the timbre which is our shift to the pressure so let's just whack that up full there on the matrix or turn the timbre all the way down and now we can do stuff like this probably a little bit too obvious so let's take that a little bit something like this maybe if we turn down or rather turn up the band pass it won't be so overbearing but that's quite a nice thing we are the robots that sort of thing becomes rather fun we are the robots so you can give yourself expression to the voice almost like a filter that's opening up well it kind of is multiple filters all moving at the same time that is quite expressive quite expressive quite expressive so another thing we could do on the wave here is if we wanted to get some pulse width modulation we could maybe go over to uh we use a cycling envelope go into the wave here we set our wave down to when it's the saw and then just go just above that and we can apply our cycling envelope to the wave parameter because cycling envelope is um unipolar so you're going to push it upwards that's probably running very very fast at the moment but we can slow it down a bit and now we have pulse width modulation on our voice which is quite cool perhaps we should play perhaps we should play some chords we should play some chords we should play some chords i think that's pushing off into noise maybe we should play some chords we should play some chords fun uh perhaps one of the things we could try is if we have our band width all the way down here and rather than have this on the um pressure perhaps we should have that working with an LFO so let's take that off the pressure and put it onto an LFO and let's make it go slower slower slower and are you back to one monophonic and it has this really cool um almost flanger sound to it we can open up the band width and it just sweeps around in a really cool way a really cool way and this is without even touching the filter perhaps we can get it going a little bit further around speed it up and now it's sounding pretty crazy and again we're not even using the filter yet we could add some resonance and have some really interesting stuff happening in the middle range perhaps very cool very cool so to finish off i've got a teenage engineering ko just got a little drum beat on it lovely jubbly and we can plug that in using the same adapter i was using for the headset so here it is plugged in to the uh microphone instead i can hear nothing at the moment because we're not playing anything but if i play an over there we can hear that our drum machine is getting vocoded and this is a amazing way to generate additional parts along with the drumbeat that have the rhythm of the drumbeat built in but with a harmonic or melodic idea in there and of course we can experiment with the different controls as well so we can generate we have the wave tone up to noise kind of a uh additional hi-hat clappy sound out of what's already there which is really cool that would sound great mix back in let's move the timbre around a bit one thing that i found that's quite interesting is if we apply pitch bend especially with the uh band turn down really cool almost chorus sound there but yeah moving the pitch around almost gives like a high resonance flanger sound so let's try um some LFO pitch maybe and as we go lower down you start getting these really cool rhythmic things happening because we're pushing the pitch down so low that's becoming kind of clicks and interestingly even though we're not even though we're not putting a voice into it this is doing the job of the voice it kind of gets this vocal quality to it which is really cool anyway i hope you enjoyed that little jaunt around the micro freak vocoder uh if you did please do consider giving the video a good old thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun i will do my very best to bring this into a stream in the next few days so if people have particular questions they want answering all things they want me to try out in real time i'll i'll be able to do that there but otherwise as always thank you so much for joining me take care until next time bye