xmlguy wrote:I'm still waiting for someone to actually describe what it does that's different and good. I'm not saying it doesn't do something different or good by asking this question. I don't have one. I haven't heard one. I'm interested in good vocal effects. There isn't a lot of information I've found about this 24 year old gear.
I didn't mean to be harsh. I had answered, maybe in too short a way.
I'll explain, and you'll see that I was on the point.
the DVP-1 is a vocoder... er...
is NOT a vocoder in the modern and complete meaning of the word.
It has NO audio in for the carrier, just audio in for the modulator,
and has very limited programming access to the filterbank.
It is indeed almost a "preset" vocoder.
It "vocodes" some internal waves [quasi-vocal waves, which some musicians used as solo voices! Awful, IMHO, but higly recognizable and indeed playable], some aahhh and ooohh and eeeehs,
applying to the the usual filter modulation following the inout voice.
the CONTRA are that: it has a limited range of tones, it is not suitable for use with a drum riff as modulator, and it's very limited for exoerimentation.
the PRO is... one: it is so little programmable because the filters are carefull and musically set at paramentes which nicely match the various internal waves.
The result is ALWAYS smooth and musical.
No matter how you fiddle with controls, no matter how much you scream in the mic, the output is consistent, sweet. Musical. The output is clear and powerful, when you get far from the micro you get less saturation and volume but no loss of definition.
It's a "less variations, more quality" tool.
You can experiment little, but if you are performance-oriented it's always ready to go.
On the contrary, a Radias or a K-station or the radias-M3 has a very programmable vocoder, very powerful, with plenty of tweakability, but if you start fidling with the filter bak you'll ear MANY unpleasant sounds until you get to a result.
If you count how many GOOD variations you can get from a radias in the end, and HOW MANY from a DVP-1,
the DVP-1 has as many as the Radias. On the radias you try 25000 and use 10, in the DVP-1 you try 11 and use 10.
To me, that's a compliment.
It's like some analogue synths which
"can't do wrong".
No matter how you twist them, they may sound better or worse, but never screechy, never "bad".
There's almost no way of having a minimoog sound "cheap", right? Well, there's almost no way of having the DVP-1 sound "eeeechhh!".
Think of experimenting live (or of being focused on music not on "tech lust"): that's enormous value.
In addition, on the DVP-1 you can play
* directly the internal waves , for strange low-fi choirs
* or use it like an harmonizer (not the best I have ever seen, to be polite).
When the DVP-1 was NEW, the harmonizer was state-of-the art and the vocal "samples" were nice.
Today they are laughable.
What remains is the men-hours spent by somebody who programmed the vocoder to be tighlty integrated (see above).
On sale for 250 euros in good conditions, it's excelent bang for the buck.
bananmelon wrote:ps. maybe u know what vocoder has been used by Joe Zawinul after using DVP-1? i mean recordings from 1996-2004
For what I know, which is not the Bible, just some observation live, LOTTA listening, a chat or two and lot of experimenting with the tools myself,
JZ used the DFP-1 until very late.
It's the DVP-1 on "the immigrants", "lost tribes" and even on "world tour".
I later saw a clavia micro-modular (I used it myself and it's very nice. It even does very nice self-vocoding [input a synth "hammond" patch into modulator, a saw into carrier, leave the mic open on stage, get the typical zawinul solo with odd harmonics getting seemingly out of nowhere. That's hard to emulate on a digital vocoder [the radias just can't do it, it's too screechy], and the digital clavia managed to get it).
Then JZ finally moved to Roland's voice processing tools, finally the XT, which he said was "the best vocoder he had used" (think of the vocal samples in "faces and places", and listen to those voices used live in "75", where you realize some of the solo sounds are just snippets of the long intro samples used in "faces and places", played on the XT).
In the meantime he experimented with the wavestation A/D and more or less anything, but the DVP-1, the clavia and the Roland XT have been the main tools.
During those years, he also added, though, an harmonizer to the vocoder:
the saturated voice in the introduction to "carnavalito" ("world tour"), e.g., comes from a digitech harmonizer,
the same has the voices in "waraya" and "bimoya" and "papa do you want some tea?" ("my people", "world tour").
Most of the time, live, the harmoinizer was a small VHM-5, but he had also a rack version, then a tc-helicon prism,
and finally the harmonizer and the vocoder converged in the Roland XT.
This is what I know, not having been his producer but just a fan+cover musician.
I am still stuck to the DVP-1 + Digitech setup, though. It's cheap and impossibly performant.