Pluggo includes an interesting device called Vocalese. Basically, Vocalese is a virtual instrument made up of a collection of phonetic samples. If you’re clever, and very patient, you can paste these samples together to create words, thereby synthesizing speech. I wasn’t really interested in doing that, nor am I patient enough, but I liked the idea of using the instrument to drive a vocoder. In order to do this I created a MIDI sequence that played each one of the phonetic samples in the instrument. Then I used a plugin to randomize the notes in realtime, so the sequence is never the same. Then I directed the output into a vocoder plugin, followed by delay and reverb for atmosphere.

Vocalese Vocoder