Roland VP-550/VP-770 - just a vocoder? (let's talk how it works)

[Compyfox]

So... Last night, Youtube graced me once more (out of nowhere) with new material by "The Protomen" (great band, btw). And one of their signature sound is a "digital choir" that is being triggered by a keyboard. I never paid much attention up until this point, only enjoyed the sound. But my curiosity finally got the better of me.

Turns out that the band is using a Roland VP-550 (old shows) and most recently a VP-770.
Quick Google Fu, and it turns out this is a vocoder keyboard?

Okay - Vocoders are not my strong suit, but I at least do know that we need a carrier signal (sine, saw, pulse, noise, etc), and a modulator signal (e.g. voice or the signal to "vocode"). But is this really just "it" for these two keyboards? Are they at their heart really just "basic" vocovers that are sold as "the best there is" (read: excellent marketing)?

Somebody please fill me in?
And what holds me off from using excellent Vocoders that are out on this market already (example: TAL Vocoder, which in turn seems to be inspired by the Roland SVC-350)?


Here is the manual (see page 9)
https://static.roland.com/assets/media/ ... 550_OM.pdf


And here are a couple of videos:
(starts around 2:45)

Then the VP-550 was used as main part for this:


And for good measure, let's throw in our resident keyboard wizard:
(though some of the parts were triggered samples?!)



So yeah... am I overthinking how this thing is supposed to work?

[josesousa1984]

I believe its a high resolution vocoder (1024 bands, for example) with a carrier signal being a choir sound. I made some tests using morphoder from Waves and the result was similar. But I believe roland does more than just route the signal as carrier and modulator. As it can be used as an harmonizer (take the sound from the input signal to generate different pitches using pitch shifting algorithms), maybe it blends the harmonizer and vocoder functions. I’m searching for a plug-in thats do this for a long time, but nothing until now. The closest is vocal synth from ozone, in my opinion, but doesn’t seems to be so cool like Roland’s options. They released vocal designer board as zen core expansion for juno x and xm, but it doesn’t seems to work with ZEN-Core software yet. If someone knows a plug-in that’s sounds like vp770 would be nice. I’m wondering try to design something in Reaktor, but I’m just studying it yet.