Here are my thoughts: The harmonies sound a little creepy in the context of my songs, especially when you start gender bending them. The unison mode is rad and the whistle is surprisingly good, and the vocoder is way more fun than it should be. The octaves sounds pretty cool when you get them mixed way in the background, and you can gender bend them for crazy, trippy stuff. The reverb sounds great, absolutely great. The tracking is spot on in all modes, and my only real complaint is that they set up the presets like the Hazarai delay, where each mode gets one preset. I’d have preferred a preset bank that you can scroll through, like the Holiest Grail or the HOG, so that you could have two different vocoder sounds etc… This way is still fine, though.

I essentially bought it for the vocoder, the reverb and the unison and it doesn’t surprise me that the harmonies don’t fit my music, so I’m extremely satisfied. Overall, it gets a big thumbs up AND it has inspired me to write more ‘harmonic’ songs.

Guitar, mostly, although I noticed it worked equally well with keys. I’m a terrible pianist but I can play chords so it worked out. I’m almost embarassed to admit that I tried it with drums, it harmonized about as well as it does when you don’t plug anything into the instrument input jack.

I’m tempted to try it with an alto saxophone, find a singer and give the vocoder a whirl. Another experiment I want to do is drive the vocoder with another vocalist and see how it sounds, has anyone tried this yet?

I recorded a straight “aahhhhh” vocal loop on my 2880 to run into the Voice Box’s vocoder. You can use the 2880’s tempo control to pitch shift, which led to some awkward, tone-deaf autotune-sounding stuff.

I imagine, though, that if you had two singers singing the same thing into both the instrument and mic on the Box, it would sound the same… or at least it ought to.

Here’s an update- I received my Voice Box on Monday, went to my studio, hooked everything up and … realized for some strange reason I didn’t have an extra XLR cable lying around. ARRGGHHH! I searched everywhere and had just about every other kind of cable you can have! So here it is Wednesday, I still haven’t picked up a cable and there the VB sits calling to me. I’ll probably pick up a cable tomorrow and spend Friday messing around with it since I’m off.