Electrix • Warp Factory
Designed for both DJs and Musicians, the Warp Factory is possibly the ultimate stand-alone Vocoder. With those great big knobs, the Warp Factory is designed for straight-forward hands-on use. It has an XLR Mic input (conveniently located on the front) and a quarter-inch line input for use as the Formant or carrier signals. Then there are two quarter-inch line-inputs and two RCA phono inputs for your stereo source sounds, either drum loops, mixes, songs, synth pads, etc...
The way it works is whatever Formant signal you have, say your voice, will be warped into taking on the characteristic of the Source signal you have, say a buzzy synth sound. This would in effect give you that Robot voice effect.
The Warp section is where you'll find most of the knobs and cool features of the Warp. There is a low- and high-pass filtering switch. A 'Gender' knob adjusts the pitch of the Formant. 'Q' adjusts the width of the filtering. An 'Order' adjusts the filter resolution for clear to abstract vocoding effects. There is also Noise and a built-in oscillator Source signal whose pitch is adjusted by 'Robot Pitch'. Various Bypass and Freeze switches and complete MIDI implementation make this the ultimate Vocoder for DJs, musicians and producers. It has been used by U2, John Digweed, United State of Electronica and the Chemical Brothers.
run your keyboard into the source inputs and a mic into the front. turn the input selector to mic. turn the goofy robo pitch thing all the down (off). viola!
This box really does two things: it's a vocoder (a pretty nice one!) and what's called a balanced modulator: IE a vocoder with a fixed carrier. the people that say this box [beep] s don't know how to use it. They're referring to the balanced modulator part--the "robo pitch" knob on this thing. it sounds like a atari 2600/toy. not like a vocoder.
The vocoder section on the other hand is a very interesting one. The envelope followers have a maybe a 100ms of latency but the weird filters and pitch granularity/pitch feedbacky knob make it worth a look!