Since Renoise doesn’t share the functionality of many daws that can use audio inputs on various instrument plugins - such as Arturia’s Vocoder V - I’ve found a fairly simple workaround.
Element by Kushview. Available for free as a slightly older version, no strings, or get the new one and support further development as well. This is a vst/vsti that can route various signals, audio and midi, inside itself, and spit out the result. The design is quite simple, a node based screen, recognizable to many.
How it works:
You have a track with audio that you want vocoded. Could be vocals, drums, anything. As long as it’s audio, and in one track.
Add Element FX as a vst to the track and open the Element FX editor window.
On an empty area in the large node layout window on the right, right click and scroll down to either “vsti developer > vsti of choice” or “unverified > vst/vst3 > vsti of choice”.
For example’s sake, let’s say we’re adding Arturia’s Vocoder V.
Now create connections from the “audio in” node to the vocoder’s audio inputs, as well as from the “midi in” node to the vocoder’s midi input. Then create a connection from the vocoder’s audio outputs to the “audio out” node.
Open the editor for Vocoder V, to do this - right click the small vocoder node and select “display > embed”… you may need to adjust the window size of Element FX before you do this to see all of the interface properly.
Select a preset and set it to “voice” instead of “sample”. Close out of Element FX.
In the instrument section top right add a new instrument set to the vst/vst3 alias of your Element FX instance.
This is now your midi controlling instrument for the vocoder.
Then the setup is done… track some notes (in any channel) with the alias instrument, hit play, and you should hear the vocoder using your notes vocoding your audio from the channel Element FX is active on.
You don’t need to set any midi channels, the alias will automatically be controlling the vsti instance inside with the “all channels” setting. That being said you could probably cc most of the settings in the vocoder the regular renoise way, haven’t tried it…
GLHF!