Gadgetory

hey this is Danny with the verge we're in the back of a Ford Expedition right now in a parking lot but that is because we stumbled across teenage engineering and they have created this nice little hub for us so that we can test out some of their products we have two new products from them that build off of the very popular pocket operator series that they've had and this is really cool because for the first time they have a vocal synthesizer which is this one right here it's called speak and then they also have this other one down here called the Fela book sort of similar this is the kayo and this is the first time that they have had a sampler so a lot of the other pocket operators come with their own sort of presets almost and this is the first time where you can really run with whatever you want there's a little microphone built into the top and these can become very fluid pieces of equipment where you can just morph whatever sound that you want so one of the cool things about the pocket operators series is that you can daisy chain these together so right now we're going to put three of them together and all you really need is just the stereo eighth inch jack and then they can talk to each other whichever one you have at the front and right now we have this gold tonic this is going to be the one that is the was considered the master that is going to set the tempo and make sure all of the ones are connected together are in sync so we're gonna test out speak right now and actually record a sample into it and give it a go and see how it sounds so I'm going to press record this button right up here and then I'm going to press which pad I want to sign the vocal to and then I'm going to speak into it The Verge so you can hear it gave me a click track which is something that you would normally want just to give you a sense of the time when you're recording something in so it's recorded my vocal and then I'm going to play it back and I'm gonna try and get rid of that little bit of empty space that was before my voice and trim it to exactly when I was speaking and it's triggering really just at the beginning of that phrase so now that we have just that sample recorded in that's where the fun comes and we can start assigning different effects to it and really play around with how the audio sounds whoo that sounds like it could be on a techno track do you see up here it's telling me the type of character it's assigning to the voice so there's a robot a fifth a vocoder oh it's adding a little simple fact noise that's kind of creepy I kind of like this vocoder this was a lot of fun to use I've played with some pocket operators in the past but to be able to record myself in was a pretty good time and I it's it's always fun when you have multiple units to chain together and to really just let the creative process fly so I think I might be getting one of these for myself these two new models the KO and the speak finish out the metals line for Pocket operator and they both go for $89 so if you want something that is maybe an intro to synthesis if you're new to this whole game and you want something that you can play around with and it's pretty intuitive but gives you a lot of flexibility this might be the thing that you're looking for especially with this new line because you can record yourself directly into it there we go I think odd fabulous as you hold it yeah