Some vocoders, such as Ableton Live’s, allow you to select as few as four bands, which is cool for subtle processing of chords and leads. For Daft Punk vocoder and talkbox effects, increase the number ...

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to turn a regular drum loop into something far more harmonically interesting using Ableton Live’s built-in Vocoder. Similar results can be achieved, of course, ...

Before T-Pain was using Auto-Tune to buy girls drinks, Franklin D. Roosevelt was using the vocoder to win World War II. In “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” music critic Dave Tompkins (The Wire ...

The device famous for making human voices sound robotic did not originate in the recording studio. As music journalist Dave Tompkins writes in How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War ...

Now the vocoder has reached an even higher level in the public consciousness with the Nov. 24 release of Kanye West’s fourth album, 808s And Heartbreak. There’s no rapping on the LP.

Seeing Mogwai live obliterated my hearing, making me easy prey for when the vocoder pranked my ears. Relatedly, vocoder frequency compression has played a role in the treatment of hearing ...

Last year Floating Points, aka electronic producer Sam Shepherd, teamed with free jazz icon Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra on Promises, a staggering, emotionally charged work ...

Deviating from Thursday protocol to bring you a new, lifetime-in-the-making vocoder mix by Monk One (mix) and Dave Tompkins (ideas). "Bonus Beach" ...

When Arturia announced the MicroFreak in January of 2019 I said “there's nothing stopping Arturia from adding more oscillators down the road through firmware updates.” ...

The vocoder—code name Special Customer, the Green Hornet, Project X-61753, X-Ray, and SIGSALY—started distorting human speech in earnest during World War II, in response to the excellence of ...

The vocoder—part military technology, part musical instrument—has had quite a history. In our new Object of Interest video, we explore the vocoder in settings ranging from the Second World War ...

DAVE TOMPKINS’ new book is titled How to Wreck a Nice Beach, but it has nothing to do with the BP oil spill, or any coast at all. Instead, the phrase he chose for his book title is how the words “how ...