Make Great Vocoder Sounds In Razor

Finally! Vocoder time! NI Razor always gets praised for its great vocoder sounds, lets find out why!

To use the vocoder in Razor there are a few extra steps you need to take, first you are going to want a sound to control the vocoder with, that is the only way to let it work!

Old-school vocoders worked with a microphone and a synthesizer with keyboard. You would talk through the microphone and at the same time play the pitches that you want.

Then your voice gets tuned to the notes you play.

Besides that the vocoder analyzes the tonal character of your voice and imprints these specific harmonics to the second sound, your synth patch.

Since you really don’t want me to sing in any tutorial ever I used a drumbeat to control the vocoder.
The second sound on which the vocoder is going to imprint the drumbeat on is the Razor sound, so just your oscillators!

After you have routed your source sound to a bus you want to select which bus Razor should listen to, in Logic you do this in the upper right corner of any plugin that can receive sidechain signals.

Now that you’ve got everything running you can mess with the sound, you can change up oscillators, change filters or even change your source sound, the drumbeat in my case.

Another cool feature is that you can use the sidechain as modulation source for all other parameters, just click the gray circle beneath any of the knobs and choose Sidechain.

I hope you enjoyed this video, let me know what you think and also don’t hesitate to throw some ideas out for future tutorials!