Attack of the Cylons, or was it the VP-330!?
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- VP-330
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- VP-330 Internals
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- Calibration
This week I’ve been working on a client’s Roland VP-300 Vocoder. It was flat sounding and basically needed a re-calibration. As you can imagine this was quite time consuming since there’s quite a few test points and calibration potentiometers. So it was a matter of working through the service notes, injecting sine waves into the circuit, drinking cups of tea, reading the results and calibrating the signals. Anyway this will be my last post for a few days, since I’ll be away from the studio while moving house.
This is me, Fredrik, doing the final testing, and it really does sound much better now. I think it captures the Herbie Hancock feel from his awesome vocoder tracks, like “Better bet you love on me”, although Herbie used the now practically unobtainable Sennheiser vocoder VSM-201.
It’s punchier and gone is also the extra release of the vocoder sound that wasn’t supposed to be there. So, if you’re having any problems with weak sound from your VP-330, a calibration is probably the best way to start. The client, house producer Q-Force, was extremely pleased with the result after the calibration. Check out his cool tracks here: http://www.myspace.com/myqforce - and yes, he uses a lot of analog goodies 
This particular model is supposedly a pre-production a model, as it is lacking both serial number and the usual logos - it just says “vocoder”. The sound is really excellent though!