I've talked about this before but I've finally messed with it and got it working. Actually it's technically not a vocoder but a talk box, they're different, but I think most people think of a talk box when they're saying vocoder. Anyway it'll make your synthesizer/guitar/whatever talk and that's pretty cool, no matter what you call it! So here's the quick and dirty info for getting it done. First, the vst.
http://mda.smartelectronix.com/Grab and install. Have sonar scan for them. OK, fire up a project. You need two tracks, one for speech and one for what's going to be made to speak, and a bus. For ease of use I'm going to assume one of the tracks is a soft synth, the cakewalk tts1, since I assume most of us have access to it. Let's also assume that I've gone into the bus pain and renamed aux1 to talkbus.
OK, so you want to send the audio track of speech and the audio track of your soft synth to talkbus. Speech's send needs to be panned hard left, and the synth's hard right. For best results, mute both tracks, so you'll only hear the bus output. Turn both send levels to max, 6 DB. Insert mda talkbox as an effect on talkbus, use value change keys to pick talkbox, the only preset. Hit play. Assuming you've got both tracks filled with something, you should hear a talking keyboard patch. You can also, I think, do this live by speaking into a microphone and playing your synth. You should be able to also do this with other recorded tracks, e.g. you have guitar and drums and such recorded and you're adding a talk box part, and when you mix down of course that bus output will be mixed in, so poof! You too can recreate Peter Frampton's Show Me the Way or Do You Feel Like We Do, or for those of you what don't know the 70s, Dre and Tupak's California Love!
A couple of things i've noticed: It seems to give better articulation if you have sharp attacks, so sustained patches or some of those that do portamento ala the Pentagon I might not work as well. The signal seems kind of weak, hence cranking the bus sends to max, and to get it to really come through in a mix I cranked the volume on the bus up a bit too. There are probably other, and better, ways of doing this, so if anybody plays with it or has any ideas, I'd definitely appreciate the feedback. This is just how I've gotten it to work.
P.S.Some of the other mda vsts are nifty too, there's a nice Leslie rotary speaker simulator, for example. I don't think any of them are really accessible, but on the other hand, they might not be that difficult to make accessible either if anybody wanted to have a crack at it. Enjoy!
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