At Superbooth 2018, Yamaha’s Blake Angelos gave us a quick intro to the Vocaloid VKB-100, a strange and rare ‘singing keytar’.
The Vocaloid VKB-100 is essentially a keytar built around the Vocaloid vocal synthesis engine. It’s currently only being sold in Japan, but is being used by a few electronic musicians outside of Japan, including Spanish synthesist Moira Muñoz, who made amazing use of it in her sets at Superbooth.
Played with this at SuperBooth – it is extremely weird. Pity they haven’t made an English-speaking version!!
You could get a similar effect using vocal samples on a V-Synth GT (the famous “Da Vinci” preset) and its formant shifting and time-stretching, but I think the way this can string syllables together would be hard to replicate.
Look into chipspeech/alterego
Ebay here I come!….oh that’s right shipping from Japan is INSANE!
it’s kind of like the miku pedal but in key form
Years ago, a couple of friends and I lightly tortured a pal with a pitch-shifter, because he had gotten so drunk, he was answering TV commercials. We cranked it up and watched him all but do back flips trying to figure out WTF. I wish we’d had a Vocaloid back then. We could have made it so much worse!
Used to do prank calls with the text-to-speech function on the Amiga way back in the day…. good times, good times…
The Gakken Pocket Miku is a cheap and cheerful way to play Vocaloid sounds live. I bought mine for just over $20 new. I then connected it to a keyboard controller via an iPad, a MIDI processing app, and a USB hub — all battery-powered. Photo and details here: http://www.emusician.com/how-to/diyadvisor-jan2018