The Electro-Harmonix V256 Vocoder welds your voice to your axe inspiring the twist of creativity that can make all of the difference. Bend your gender, drone your tone, and invite aliens into your work of art. The V256 lets you adjust the vocoder from 8 to 256 bands taking you back to the 80’s and propelling you into the future at the same time. Bring your vocals up to snuff with advanced processing ‘Reflex Tune’, today’s most popular pitch correction effect. Controls The Blend knob sets the mix of dry vocal signals to the V256 effect. In all modes except Transposition, Instrument Ctrl, and Reflex-Tune, the Bands knob sets the number of bands for the vocoder. The Tone knob adjusts the tonal quality of the effect. Gender Bender Knob has a formant shift that corresponds roughly to the length of the vocal tract. In the first six modes, the Pitch knob controls the pitch of the internal synthesized voices. The Mode knob enables the user to scroll through the 9 modes. The Mic Bypass footswitch toggles the V256 between effect mode and bypass mode. If the Status LED is lit, then the V256 is in effect mode. Use the Mic Gain switch to change the sensitivity of the mic pre-amp in the V256. On the side of the V256, next to the Mic Input XLR jack, is the Phantom Power toggle switch. Pushing the toggle switch up will supply over 40V to the microphone. The Phantom Power switch should only be set to On when using a condenser microphone. The Mic Input XLR jack is a fully balanced microphone input. Connect your microphone directly to this input jack. In the vocoder modes of the V256, the instrument signal can be used as the carrier signal for the vocoder effect. In Instrument Ctrl mode, the instrument signal is used to determine the note that will replace the pitch of the sung note. In Reflex-Tune mode, with the Pitch knob set fully CCW, the instrument signal will determine the diatonic key and the V256 will quantize to notes in that key scale. Press and release the Preset footswitch to load a preset into the presently selected mode. The V256's effect is output through the Effect Output XLR jack on the side of the unit. The effect signal as well as the dry and bypassed vocals are output from this jack. The Instrument output on the V256 outputs a blend of the effected signal as well as the dry instrument signal or MIDI controlled internal synthesizer.