I got the Roland boutique version it has some extra stuff and sounds great, but I rarely ever use it, just like every other vocoder, fun for a little while but gets old fast (for me). The string and voice sections are why I keep it TBH, definitely has that Kraftwerk sound.
The originals are highly prized for the string ensemble sections. I’m not short of a string machine (or 5) but I’d like to add one of these to the collection once they hit the second hand market.
The Crave on the other hand… again I’ve got everything it does covered but I’m a sucker for synth/seq combo’s…can’t wait to get one!
Great video. The first two minutes was so emotionally affecting for me – a real surprise, i think it is the combination and repetition of the heart felt human lyrical poem, in the artificial voice and the harmonic movement in vocoder. The other examples were well done too. The examples of vocoder drums are innovative and more like an effect rather than vocoder.
These examples make me think about various text to speech systems and how they might work in this.