SampleScience releases Virtual Vocaid, a free instrument plugin for Windows and macOS.
I will admit I did a double-take when reading the product description for this one. The fine folks at SampleScience are back at it again with a brand new instrument to tickle your fancy.
Virtual Vocaid isn’t like your typical synth instruments, however. Instead, the latest freebie from SampleScience emulates a vocal assistance device.
The Vocaid is a speech synthesizer, first and foremost. Dr. Stephen Hawking is arguably its most famous user. Now, you can harness the same virtual speech in your own productions.
The Virtual Vocaid is laid out similarly to the rest of the SampleScience product line. You’ve got a quartet of effects to manipulate the sounds, with distortion, delay, chorus, and reverb all being present.
These built-in effects won’t win awards or praise in terms of quality, but they are certainly usable with the sound sources on offer.
Sound can further be manipulated through the use of the included envelope. This is a standard four-stage ADSR. It primarily functions as the amplitude’s main envelope, but you can still get a little funky with things.
SampleScience has also packaged a fairly standard low-pass filter, which sounds fine to my ears. I didn’t really try to get it to self-oscillate; I’ll leave that to madder scientists than me.
The sound design is rounded with an LFO. You know them, love them, and they function as expected. I generally prefer when an LFO can get into audio rate insanity, but I genuinely worry it’ll sound like a tortured automaton at that point.
Virtual Vocaid isn’t for everyone (including myself), which I’ll readily admit. You might find a certain utility to having this sort of speech synthesis in your DAW. It is capable of generating speech across all possible combinations of words and letters, so you can use it as intended.
Virtual Vocaid is available for Windows and Mac computers. Supported plugin formats are VST, VST3, and AU. It is available for Apple Silicon devices, but there also is support for older Intel Macs.
It is a bizarre instrument. However, sometimes that’s just what you need.
Download: Virtual Vocaid (FREE/ Name your price)
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1 Comment
MRG
onToto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Texas anymore… We must be over the 90s techno.