So, for this fourth instalment of the "Top Gear" series on the gear I used to produce the music on this site, let's talk about a device which is not produced by Roland! I am a big fan of the Roland products, as you might have already guessed, but I did use some other equipment as well, like this one: the Korg R3.The Korg R3 is a virtual analog synthesizer with a buit-in vocoder. I just love the typical analog sounds one can get from classic synths, and this one is quite good at replicating that in a digital way. It is quite a small synth with a limited amount of knobs and sliders, which makes it so much more intuitive to play with. It has decent presets and more than sufficient interesting ways of producing your own patches.But it is of course hard to ignore its killer feature: a built-in vocoder! It makes it so easy to make those typical vocoder sounds. For those of you unfamiliar with a vocoder: think Kraftwerk or Daft Punk. A vocoder takes the formant of the human voice and applies it to a sound source by filtering it accordingly. This is only one way of using a vocoder, but this is not a music lesson. As of day one I had so much fun playing around with the vocoder. I bought this synth while working on the Erase. Redefine. Execute. album (which was a concept album which I made in under a month) and it is already heavily featured on that album.The subsequent albums have all featured the sounds of the R3 in some tracks, either by using its amazing sounds and filters, or by using the vocoder. Quite a fun little synth, especially for its modest price range.