The instrument
The VP-330 is a paraphonic ten-band vocoder with analogue strings and synthetic choir sounds à la Mellotron and Solina. A single device that combines everything was unique. The keyboard can be individually divided into the three sound sections Vocoder, Strings and Human Voice Sounds to play two different sounds from one keyboard. Polyphony is made possible with an octave divider circuit. The Roland SVC-350 is a similar vocoder in rack form.
The most famous users are the electronic pioneer Vangelis for the album See You Later and the songs Chariots Of Fire, The Bounty, Mask, BladeRunner, Laurie Anderson for the song O Superman, the Japanese electronic inventor Tomita for his vocoder choirs, Pink Floyd for the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason and Tony Banks from Genesis, who replaced his heavy Mellotron with the vocoder on the Duke tour. A total of around 2000 copies of the Roland VP-330 were produced.
Details
In addition to the vocoder and the generation of string sounds, the VP-330 can play back four different choir sounds. Each uses four bandpass filters from a pool of seven filters. It also has a BBD-based ensemble effect that compresses the strings and optionally the choirs and vocoder. Only 10 bandpass filters (150Hz, 220Hz, 350Hz, 500Hz, 760Hz, 1.1kHz, 1.6kHz, 2.2kHz, 3.6kHz, 5.2kHz) and a high-pass filter are used.
The strings section with a wide range of sounds can be switched individually via both keyboard halves. It is identical to the RS-505 Paraphonic, but with only one foot position (4'). Attack and release are freely selectable, and the Tone control can be used to adjust the overtone content of the strings from dark to bright. The human voices are not samples, but are generated synthetically in the VP-330. The sound is based on a master oscillator whose output is multiplied by an octave divider circuit.
(Source: amazona)