I just got my V256 pedal today and wanted to give my first impressions.

Firstly, a big “THANK YOU!” to EH for creating exactly the tool I have been looking for. I’m a keyboard player and vocalist and I run my vocals through lots of pedals. I also don’t want to switch microphones when I vocode, like I would have to on a MicoKorg or my Novation. This pedal allows me to switch the vocoding on and off at will with my foot. Solid!

What’s good:

Vocoding: the vocoder is simply stellar. It is always a tricky feat to get a good tone out of a vocoder since the results depend largely on your source signals, but this vocoder is about as easy as it gets. The ability to move from 8-256 bands is a godsend and gives the pedal plugin-like flexibility. Consonants are clearly articulated and can be enhanced or reduced using the tone knob. And you can save your settings to a preset! Perfect. This is what the pedal says it will do, and it delivers. If you don’t have an external synthesizer or just don’t want to run your axe through the pedal, there is a rudimentary internal synthesizer that provides a sawtooth wave whose pitch is controllable via a knob, for that “intergalactic” effect. It can also be controlled via MIDI, and responds (in a configurable way) to both pitch bend and mod wheel.

MIDI: Speaking of MIDI, the capabilities of this unit run pretty deep. Every parameter of the pedal (with the exception of mic gain, phantom power and mic bypass) can be controlled via MIDI, making it the ultimate pedal for performing synthesists such as myself. Just make sure to set your controller to channel 16!

Transpose: The transpose mode, which allows you to affect both the formant shape and pitch of your voice, produces a very realistic effect. I was able to make myself sound like a convincing radio personality with just two turns of the knob. The only issue with this mode (as well as Instrument Control and Reflex Tune) is a very intrusive noise gate, which I will get to later.

I/O: This is not something one normally raves about, but the fact that the pedal has both instrument and microphone ins and outs, with independent blend control for each and a bypass switch for the microphone, makes this a standout unit. No y-splitting shenanigans or creative workarounds are required to make this part of your setup. It just works!

The not-so-good:

The Noise Gate: As I mentioned above, the Transpose, Instrument Control and Reflex Tune modes suffer from a severe noise gate with what appears to be an unusually high threshold. This caused my voice, when I was speaking into the microphone at high gain through a Beta 58, to cut in and out in a way that made the audio I recorded almost unusable. I suspect it has to do with a combination of gating and bandpass filtering since the sounds that got gated were lower-pitched artifacts of speech. The voice sounds, in those modes, very effected and equalized, so if you are looking for a transparent auto-tune or transposition of your voice, this is not the tool for you. It does sound cool, though.

Overall I’m very happy with my v256 since the vocoder is so top-notch, but I’m surprised at the way it handles the audio signal in the modes mentioned above, especially because reflex-tune was supposedly one of the core features of the unit.