The first adjustments to try are with the band levels you might want to even out the spectrum or do just the opposite and emphasise aВ few bands. You'll notice that even the default settings significantly colour the sound - not necessarily aВ bad thing. The default settings make aВ good starting point, and it is instructive to simply toggle the vocoder on and off. Try that, for example, with aВ pad or ambient sound. When you want to use the vocoder as aВ singleвЂ‘source processor for things like formant shifting, gating, and dialling in your own EQ curve, insert it on the track you want to process and choose 'Modulator' as the carrier. Their fader levels let you audition the effectsвЂ‘processed modulator and carrier, but you'll probably want them at minimum after the effects have been set up. The three Return tracks at the top manage the vocoder, the modulator effects processing and the carrier effects processing. This is also the choice you'd make for the 'singing synth' effect. 'External' is the most useful choice for our purposes: it lets you use the output from any audio, virtualвЂ‘instrument or return track, as selected in the Audio From menu below it. The carrier signal for the vocoder is chosen using the dropвЂ‘down menu at the top left of the control panel.

Each one can be grabbed with the mouse and set as you like. These act as level faders, allowing you to individually attenuate each band. Notice in particular the green dashes across the top of the graphic display. Settings for Bands, Range, BW, Gate and so on are also displayed at the bottom of this section.

If you use Live's Vocoder plugвЂ‘in as an insert effect (I'll discuss alternative methods aВ bit later), the sound on the track onto which it is inserted becomes the modulator, and it is that sound's frequency spectrum you see in the vocoder's central graphic display. To show you what IВ mean, let's look at aВ few simple examples, and then move on to more complex applications to see just how much aВ vocoder can actually do. Thinking of it in this way reveals many applications that you might not at first call on aВ vocoder to do. AВ different sound, called the modulator (the voice in the 'singing synth' model), modulates the EQ band levels. The sound that gets equalised (the synth in the 'singing synth' model) is called the carrier. If you've mostly used aВ vocoder to produce the ubiquitous 'singing synth' effect, you might not have thought of it as an EQ, but at heart that's what it is. The barвЂ‘graph display in the Vocoder's control panel shows the EQ curve of the sound used as the modulator - the sound on the track onto which the vocoder is inserted. There's more to Live's Vocoder than meets the ear: itВ can generate all manner of unexpected effects.

How to vocode to a song