Metamatic Forums Socialising The Green Room Great songs featuring the vocoder

Great innovation in the 70's Did Den ever indulge ?

Anyway to start you off

it has to be hiiiiiiim ! Go Herbie lad !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_55JoURq1Q

Not sure if the Talk Box* is really a vocoder (so I may be straining the remit somewhat) but...rather than mention the usual Düsseldorf suspects, I thought I'd put in a word for the late Roger Troutman who performed Talk Box in Zapp, and on here;

Boom! Go Green! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7qCaCcfjXg

(*think Frampton Comes Alive)

Good shouts, comrades and apart from the Kling Klang Bros., I've managed come up with this one by Sir Giorgio of Moroder who obviously had one kicking about the studio and decided he'd give it a try on the intro to this one, and probably elsewhere:

Top album that. According to wiki; Some effects Giorgio used on this album are: bongo drums ran through a vocoder, vocals ran through a vocoder, kick drum and stomps ran through a vocoder

He had a vocoder, and he was gonna use it!

Well, it's got a vocoder on it, innit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdTELokKfCk

YOU WHAT!?

Going through one's late 70's record collection on a Sunday (as one does) one came across an album/band which made great use of the Vocoder on various albums/tracks. You may remember that the chorus to one of the songs went something like this..

Mister Blue Sky
Mister Blue. Sky.
Mi-ster Blue. Sky-yy.

The album was Out of the Blue by Brum's finest (before Duran Duran) the Electric Light Orchestra. Check out this track for some hardcore Vocoder-p*rn (kicks in at 0.44)






..and there's plenty more where that came from!

To me the real vocoder sound is the modified one used by in "The robots".
https://youtu.be/w-Jq7BHtQMA
-Only years after hardcore listening I realised, that there are vocoded lyrics also in "Spacelab" - I thought it was just a synthesizer sound. -Back those days, a young friend of mine had heard "The robots" on the radio, and asked, if we had heard that song with chorus line "Peep poop a popot"? -ha! -ha! -ha!

I find the usual vocoder sound cheesy. There are lots of songs with it, but difficult to spot great songs among them. Neil Young's "We r in control" comes to mind.
https://youtu.be/C9ijiFJ8Q0k

Pet Shop Boys' "One of the Crowd" always makes me chuckle.

Stumbled across Visage track Blocks on Blocks tonight.

That has vocoder on it.

Brian