The entire process of setting up things in linux is more than often a hard one. Newbies have to deal with command lines and learning curves which range from steep roads to climbing mountaintops. Small goals like these in this tutorial can help people get confident in using linux.

* a sound mind(pardon the pun) * jack configured correctly * either patchage or knowledge of connecting jack apps to each other * AlsaModularSynth * Sirlab's(or Achim Settelmeier's) ladspa vocoder plugin * vkeybd or any other way of sending midi notes into jack * a physical microphone(the day we can emulate that is far from here)

Start up patchage, ams and vkeybd. If you get a lot of xruns or crashes from patchage, your jackd daemon isn't started correctly, and the line in ~/.jackdrc should be changed. A last resort for help on getting this right is the linux audio developers channel on irc.freenode.net, #lad. Now, if everything is right, you should be able to connect the apps in patchage as follows: There probably are more things on the canvas, but you can ignore them. System capture and playback is what represents your physical microphone and speakers. You can test them by connecting them without going through ams. Blue is audio, green is midi. When you're done, you won't need to mind patchage anymore for this tutorial.

On ams' canvas you can put all kinds of modules. I will tell you about those necessary for a vocoder.

These deal with what goes in and out