Vokko

I found this vocoder at KVR looking in the forums for a vocoder. I came across a lot of options, and ELS vocoder was one I had settled on after hearing demo's. The ELS vocoder is about $300 though. I found Vokko for $20 not long after. They are different beasts and I'm only comparing them here because I had pretty much settled on ELS vocoder before I found Vokko. ELS has a superb analog sound and would probably win for new unique sounds and for certain types of vocoding. But Vokko is capable of some wonderfully intelligible results, and capable of giving them quickly and easily. It gives woderful traditional results and it blows me away how clear and easy to understand my recorded lyrics come across.

Vokko has soundfont support built in and soundfonts are supplied as selectable presets, and once routing in my DAW was acheived it was instant gratification. To scroll through the soundfonts and achieve drastically different results on my voice quickly and easily is a godsend. The soundfonts are well chosen and give a good variety of results quickly and easily.

I really don't see how this cannot overall score less than a 9/10 at least. The documentation could be a tad better re: setting it up in different DAW's and some newbies may be lost here to an extent. But customer support has been top notch. This is a labour of love for the creator, don't expect big company response here (but that is a good thing coming from having dealt with many big companies!). Buying this gave me that warm fuzzy feeling of supporting an artist for their good work, and I am extra happy with the price! $20 is ridiculous. With a better U.I and bigger marketing this could fetch much more (nothing wrong with the U.I btw, works fine).

A final note. This is apparently Synth Edit. I don't care. Forget about any misgivings you may with synthedits capabilities and limitations. There are quite a few great synthedit based units out there...This is one of those units. I put it down to to great programming and know how. Vokko just sounds like a really clear, really musical and really top notch vocoder.

I have been dreaming of having a decent vocoder for years. And finally here is a good sounding, highly functional answer to that wish! Vokko has a very efficient synthesis engine on it w/ 3 oscelators (1 PWM, 1 rompler style, and 1 noise) which produces a great variety of carrier sounds. It also can do soundfont playback as a carrier as well, but I have not messed with that feature yet, so I can't comment on it. The interface could be a little cleaner, but it is usable. And certainly the most gratifying thing about it is that you get to install it, load it up in your host, and instantly start vocoding. I am running Sonar 4 as my host and I have managed to crash it a few times when using this plugin, so I think it could be more stable, but it is fun enough for me to put up with the crashes. Perhaps other hosts would be more stable.

This thing produces very nice sounding vocoding effects, vocal modulation sources result in highly comprensible results as long as you use the proper carrier synth settings. Other uses other than vocals (drums, random experimentation, etc.) also sounds great. The manual is not too well written and a little jumbled, but the user interface is simple enough that a quick look thru the manual is about all you'll ever need to get it. A lot of the features seem to be overkill to me, apparently it is based on someone else's vocoder effect and then other modules (such as the soundfont player) were added to make this into a new instrument. I haven't really bothered with the filters or envelopes, since I am using this mainly for vocoding vocals at this time. Many of the features seem extraneous to the core purpose of this instrument, but then again maybe I am just not using it the way the designer intended.

One thing to note is that the price for Vokko is $30US, not the $15 indicated above. That was the price I was charged for it as of 04-11-1 at least. But still, $30 is a great price for this handy little tool if you don't have a vocoder feature rolled up into some other plugin that you already have. This is a great sounding piece of dedicated software.

Vokko 1.65

what can we say about Vokko, 1st up we have tried just about every vocoder plugin out there
(minus Vokator by NI)

and this baby beats them all hands down, it gives instant vintage vocoder-ing as well as more warped tweaking fx.

many vocoders we tried needed lots of setting up and messing before getting a decent sound, not the case with Vokko, it does it right away, instant gratification.

another really cool feature is using it as a pitch locking effect, ie:fixing flat notes in vocal parts.
(not like autotune that can have the cher munchkin effect we all know and hate ? )

before snubbing Vokko as a synthedit creation
this one 100% proves that good ides/design can sound as good as any other format.

the price is outstanding and the fact you can load your own sf2 carriers makes it one fantastic plugin.

big thanks to Matias.