AW: VP-330 (analog speech synthesis)

[Haible Juergen]

	>The VP-330 choir sounds did sound pretty good, and this ultimately
led me to
	>building a synth module based on the circuit in question.

	[...]

	>I've been feeding mine with rectangular/square waves or three
octaves mixed
	>at various levels, and find that some settings give much better
vocal sounds
	>than others.

Played one a few months ago, and I was really impressed.
Planned to build these filters, too, but all I've done so far are a few
Spice simulations.
What has kept me from building it so far is that in the original it's not
just feeding one input signal to a filter bank. Different partial filters
of a certain preset are fed by different footage signals from the
divider circuitry. But maybe I should build it nevertheless and 
experiment with different input signals.

>Vangelis reportedly liked the VP-330, so I guess it is used for the
>choir sounds on the Chariots of Fire Soundtrack album. Listen to the
>beginning of "Eric's Theme", or the closing minutes of the title track
>(and I mean "Chariots of Fire, not "Titles" :-), starting at about 17:10
>up to the end.
>And the "See you later" album has been mentioned in the VP-330 context,
>but I don't have that one.

Rumors go that Vangelis has changed to the 330 when he abandoned
the Mellotron.
See You Later is an excellent, much underrated album. Vocoder is
clearly audible on "I can't take it anymore", but the real gems are
the minimalistic "Memories of Green", and the whole second side.

Another speciality of the VP-330 is its bend slider. Very effective for
making vocal sounds more realistic. Different from other bender devices.

JH.