This video, via markusfuller, continues his series of videos looking inside Roland’s new Aira boxes.
In this video, he takes a look inside the Roland Aira VT-3 Vocal Transformer (not too much to see!) and tests using it as an effects unit for the TR-8, TB-3 and AX-Synth.
He sure covered every base with a fine-toothed comb. He really nailed it when he ran the AX-1 through it. We all know what vocoders, pitch-shifters and formant modifiers do, but it really started to shine as a macro effects box. He did a great job of stepping through several of its behaviors and showing off its musicality with demonstrative licks. With a bit of trimming, this should be Roland’s demo for the VT.
I bought the VT-3 because I wanted a pitch shifter/harmonizer and used it with guitar and a Volca Beat. If I were Roland I wouldn’t advertise the VT-3 as just a voice effect.
I bought one and I am very pleased with it. Good to see someone having a light hearted aproach to music tech.
I am glad it’s not my warranty though…
The VT-3 looks and sounds good to me – but is there really no way to ‘play’ the vocoder using a keyboard? That seems like a huge gap.
I can understand Roland’s decision to leave out some of the desirable functionality because they have other equipment on offer like the VP-7 that supports playing the vocoder using a MIDI signal.
Haha oh, actually inside. Wasn’t really expecting that. Always good fun to take a peek inside kit, but I’m not sure what he went looking for there. All these modern digital instruments are going to look largely the same, just a lot of basic stuff feeding into a monolithic DSP chip and the clunky bits to deal with us meatsacks. For the real stuff, you’ve gotta strip down the package and break out the AFM! 🙂