Zynaptiq’s Vocoder Isn’t That Great To Be Honest

I’m one of those guys that just loves vocoders. Even if you don’t know vocoders are you’ll have experienced them in one form or another - mostly embedded in the background of tracks you’ve heard but didn’t realise. And on ELO’s Mr Blue Sky.

Zynaptiq purchased the Prosoniq IP (software algorithms essentially and legal spiel declaring ownership) some time ago and they’ve been slowly turning the DSP into new products, most recently the re-release of the Triumph application and the Wormhole plugin (though I had the Prosoniq version of this, it always seemed a bit heavy-handed as an FX tool). 2018 they announced, at the NAMM of that year, they were working on the Orange Vocoder product, and presented some algorithms which sounded very impressive over the potato-quality recordings we had to examine.

In the last couple of months Zynaptiq Vocoder has been released and many people will be super-excited about their new vocoding tool, and yes, it has some interesting algorithms, but for me it falls flat for what it could have been, and what the vocoder-obsessed fans were holding out for. Basically I wanted more parameters exposed, and a better Filterbank reverb, and I got 1 parameter (Formant) and a worse Filterbank reverb. So for me, well, it could have been so much more - but it feels like an Early Learning Centre vocoder.

Here’s a video about my observations, thoughts and vocoder desires.