In my opinion the greatest instrument of all time is the Human Voice. This is of course, only my opinion and with such a wide choice out there I’m sure others will agree and disagree.
To name the second greatest (in my opinion) I find an almost impossible task. I’d actually make EVERY other instrument 2nd. I couldn’t imagine a world without Fender Rhodes Electric Piano’s, Hammond Organs, Parker Guitars, The humble Tambourine, and then some.
Although I rank both camps accordingly, the existence of both working together side-by-side I see as the ultimate musical experience, A 50/50 split of requirement right down the middle.
An a cappella is nice but half finished I always find. Wrap some music around it and the picture becomes complete. There will always be a time and a place for just Instrumental music… at the orchestra, on the beach, in the elevator, etc. But there’s nothing quite like some vocal narrative to bring a song to life.

Now considering the Vocal Instrument is the oldest living instrument known to man, and with that the most recorded, You would have thought that Vocal Technology would be right up there along with let’s say Guitar Technology.
Surprisingly not in-fact.
I don’t mean ‘Microphone Technology’. That subject was conquered and put to bed in the 1950′s. I’m thinking more along the lines of vocal modulation, pitch correction, phrasing and vari-phrasing. From sounding like a robot to sounding like a balearic rave diva; finding GOOD programs and hardware to perfom these tasks has always been a grey, specialised and in-return costly market.
Take Vocoding for example, if you’ve got a spare £2,500 you could buy a 2nd hand Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus. The mother of all Vocoders.
However, if your running on a much leaner budget KORG’s Microkorg has a pretty decent vocoder engine. I’ve used the Vocoder on Korg’s MS 2000 and the Microkorg and they are both pretty decent, but nowhere near the Kraftwerk quality the VP-330 offers.
There are plenty of ways inside of your DAW to modulate and mangle your vocals, you can of course stick plug-ins on the vocal strip and go for it that way, or alternatively go for splicing and dicing techniques such as REX’ing or ‘Elastic Audio’. Neither of these methods give you that ‘realtime’ thrill of live vocal modulation though which I believe you need for true creative inspiration. Stopping and editing doesn’t float anybody’s boat.

So the search really does continue. For a synthesis technique that’s been perfected since the 1970′s you would have thought it would be in abundance and in the sub £99 market. You can easily emulate a Moog Synth these days from within any DAW yet wanting to sound like Kraftwerk (in realtime) is still a difficult and costly commodity to acquire.