Et Misericordia from Bach’s Magnificat is one of the first pieces of music I truly fell in love with (after Siegfried, of course). I first heard it when I was about 10 (1981), and over the years have sought out outstanding recordings of this magnificent (!) piece.

Since I now run a synthesizer blog, and just acquired Prosoniq’s Orange Vocoder, I decided to perform this piece myself. The following is version 1.0 of Et Misericordia recorded in Logic with MiniMoog Vs, FM8s, Massives, ES2s and the Orange Vocoder.

I’m still fine-tuning the vocal qualities of the vocoder (it can take quite a bit of tweaking to get it to sound good), and will post the updates when they become available.

What’s a Vocoder?

From Wikipedia:
A vocoder (pronounced /ˈvoʊkoʊdər/, a combination of the words voice and encoder) is an analysis / synthesis system, mostly used for speech in which the input is passed through a multiband filter, each filter is passed through an envelope follower, the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated, and the decoder applies these (amplitude) control signals to corresponding filters in the (re)synthesizer.

In English, that simply means ‘a singing synthesizer’. Great fun!

Want one of your own?
Head over to Software & Hardware Vocoders at KVR Audio