There are several soft vocoders out there to choose from, but to my mind, the one thing that stands out about this is the addition of a built-in sample player, which if you’re not wanting to sing/speak into it live, is an extremely useful addition. This one’s based on the one produced by Moog in the ’70s. It looks/sounds/plays like a vocoder and is fairly intuitive to use. Alongside the great emulation, it comes packed with modern editing and effects processing features for you to properly sculpt the sound going through that machine! You can import your own samples, and crap them up through the EMUII engine for that lush 90’s hiphop vibe. The layout is easy to get around – the majority of the work being done on the ‘computer screen’ when you zoom in. Chillwave owes a lot to this sample synth. A totally crappy sampling engine, a bunch of digital noise and grit, and boom, tons of character.

It’s one of the original sample players, or ROM libraries.

This thing in its original plastic form currently costs about the same as a decent car.

Arturia piano review