TC Helicon voicelive2?

NeoSound

NeoSound

Fractal Fanatic
I've been considering getting one of these for live use. Does anyone use one? or have any pro's or con's?
 
Drummer in my band bought one about 8 weeks ago and we've been using with our Duran Duran tribute. He's also using it with his psychedelic band.

For the most part: awesome. It really is a vocal engineer in a box. The presets and IA switches are easy enough for the singers to understand. You have to run it in to as neutral a channel on your board as possible because it can do a lot of EQ'ing on its own. The feedback suppression is top notch.

Some of the effects are a little on the cheese side. You have to be careful not to overdo it. I suppose that's true with all effect boxes. But once you've got it set up it's quite simple for the vocalist to step through the chains as he/she sings through the song. Adding things in as they move through the pieces.
 
What Ian said!
Would like to add that - unlike the lesser "boxes" - it also gives you the ability to harmonize with a harmony. By that I mean that most voice effects are designed for use by the lead vocalist (or solo singer). This unit lets you set the harmonies to work with someone singing a harmony - which is why I have it. Takes some programming to change the default patches to do that, but it works and sounds really good.
Like Ian said also, got some "cheesy" stuff in there that the chances of real use are zip - but what set of factory presets doesn't. They're designed to show off the units capabilities. I give this box a big WOOT!!
 
Sounds great! Musicians friend has the extreme version (more loop time better mic pre?) same price as the normal but with 15% off right now. I'm not very good at singing and playing at the same time (can't walk and chew bubble gum:) ) but maybe this box will be an inspiration to practice that more.

My 20 year old daughter played some music she likes for me the other day and I really can't get over how much the auto-tune thingy is being used and abused nowdays, and the bad thing is she and my wife just thought that was their singing voice?
 
NeoSound said:
I really can't get over how much the auto-tune thingy is being used and abused nowdays
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Gosh Groban got autotune put into Room 101 last night, so things might improve!
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I love mine! Harmonies & effects are pretty sweet. The thing about many TC products is the lack of PC/Mac editors especially for the VL2 & VL Touch (I have both) which, are important to me, however, those products do sound great despite that. You won't be disappointed with excellent out of the box presets. I've spent hours just going through them & having fun much like I do with the AxeFx ... some sounds/effects are inspiring for musical ideas.
 
NeoSound said:
Sounds great! Musicians friend has the extreme version (more loop time better mic pre?) same price as the normal but with 15% off right now. I'm not very good at singing and playing at the same time (can't walk and chew bubble gum:) ) but maybe this box will be an inspiration to practice that more.

My 20 year old daughter played some music she likes for me the other day and I really can't get over how much the auto-tune thingy is being used and abused nowdays, and the bad thing is she and my wife just thought that was their singing voice?
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I use it and love - Its used lightly in the mix.
A bud of mine thought he could use this to help his pitchy singer. IMO - you cant polish a turd with it. Its was obvious!
 
It's a fun unit. Just like was said above - you have to be careful not to overdo it. It can get cheezy real fast, and lose the effect. For live use, it's an awesome performance tool! ;) I prob won't use it in the studio as much, as sometimes it can seem a little unnatural to me, but it is an indispensable live tool :)
 
I got one, too. Tracking harmonies to my live guitar playing is super fast and accurate. I don't overdo harmonizing, just one voice above or below will do for the most part.
You can also do some serious tweaking for the backing vocals, e.g. how sloppy the voices follow te tracking vocal, choir effect, portamento etc.
Vocal effects (preamp, compressor, deesser) are very good, as well as delay and reverb. The special effects like autotune get annoying very fast, though. OTOH Distorsion for vocals can be very interesting when used with caution.
 
Couple of questions for you VL 2 users.
Any of you guys run into problems with the sound guys at bars when using this?
How do you guys run your guitars with it? Do you just run it into VL2 and then out into the axe?
Just don't want to make a hassle for the bars. Most sound guys dont pay enough attention to add delay in though.
 
Keg8605 said:
Couple of questions for you VL 2 users.
Any of you guys run into problems with the sound guys at bars when using this?
How do you guys run your guitars with it? Do you just run it into VL2 and then out into the axe?
Just don't want to make a hassle for the bars. Most sound guys dont pay enough attention to add delay in though.
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I make sure my mix in my monitor is what the mains are putting out. GUitar - VL2 - Out to Axe-FXII - Its just a pass thru - the VL2 has to detect what key I am in. I dont have to mess with the manual set up with the keys, this is one of the main reasons I bought it.
 
Keg8605 said:
Couple of questions for you VL 2 users.
Any of you guys run into problems with the sound guys at bars when using this?
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Nope. We've always brought our own mics and such. Now we just ask the sound guy to take the feed from the VL2 and to keep the channel flat, no outboard effects. We tend not to play places where a sound man wouldn't be receptive to technology. Nature of the act.

How do you guys run your guitars with it? Do you just run it into VL2 and then out into the axe?
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We don't. Fixed-key harmonies setup per-patch when we use the harmony feature, which is sparing. And we don't do pitch correction with it.
 
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Would these pedals help an out of tune singer (me) practice to become a better singer? Like i'd record the performance(in the privacy of my home), see how much the autotune corrected me, and try to get it to be less and less correction as i work on singing? I'm trying to find a way to become a better singer, and i've always thought that live pitch correction like this could show me where i'm going wrong, and help me focus on getting better?

Thoughts?
 
I use the version 1 and love it.

I used it to sing bkg vox. Like was said above, I can sing a harmony note and it will fill in the other harmonies, all behind the lead singer.

It is a great vocal preamp. Sounds better than a lot of input channels on even some low end pro mixers.

I use a guitar split to drive the harmonies. I can change keys and also put it into chord mode so the harmonies will be whatever chord I'm playing. I have the version 1 so I have an external second box for the guitar chord following stuff that hooks to the voice live via midi. It doubles as a tuner too. I think the guitar following is builtin to the version 2?

In my experience, you get the best results if you sing strong and confident, and pay attention to your phrase cutoffs. For singing bkg vox I maybe even exagerrate the cutoffs a tad, it makes the pitch tracker and harmony generator not warble. If you sing weak or let the air trail off at the end of a phrase, it starts to lose its mind :)

Richard
 
wake911 said:
Would these pedals help an out of tune singer (me) practice to become a better singer? Like i'd record the performance(in the privacy of my home), see how much the autotune corrected me, and try to get it to be less and less correction as i work on singing? I'm trying to find a way to become a better singer, and i've always thought that live pitch correction like this could show me where i'm going wrong, and help me focus on getting better?

Thoughts?
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I used to have really bad pitch issues. A lot of it was simply a lack of singing, so the physical singing mechanism was not really tied solidly to my perception of pitch. Things that have helped for me are doing exercises out of vocal methods, which is mostly just singing simple phrases through various keys. I also practice singing simple tunes with melodies that I have ingrained somewhere (folk songs or stuff like Amazing Grace or Xmas tunes...whatever you struggle the least with) in my head. If I have any problems I'll read and play the melody with guitar and sing to what I'm playing. I find if I set a mic up and put guitar and voice in phones, it becomes really clear quickly if I'm out of tune. Then it's a matter of tuning your voice to the guitar. If you have trouble note matching, just do that. Play one note and sing until you can really hear them come together. You can't run until you walk. It's very painful at first (at least to me it was), but unless you're really pitch deaf, you will improve the ability to match notes fairly quickly.

Before I'd go to some kind of auto tune thing to help, I'd get a really basic vocal method with a practice CD and see if just working on mechanics starts to tune you up. Just like practicing guitar, practicing singing consistently makes a huge difference. If I don't practice for a period of time, it's amazing how fast my voice can turn to UGH, but if I do practice, it gets better in a hurry. It's not easy though and you have to endure a fair amount of sounding like crap and coming back to it.

I wish I'd sung when I was young as getting better at it improves my overall musicality immensely, not just my singing. I find that with singing, just like guitar practicing mechanics as part of my playing/singing routine makes a lot of difference.
 
wake911 said:
Would these pedals help an out of tune singer (me) practice to become a better singer? Like i'd record the performance(in the privacy of my home), see how much the autotune corrected me, and try to get it to be less and less correction as i work on singing? I'm trying to find a way to become a better singer, and i've always thought that live pitch correction like this could show me where i'm going wrong, and help me focus on getting better?

Thoughts?
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I don't think so. At least on the version 1, there is no indication of how much correction is being applied based on the original note.

If you are just starting out, then learning to sing the song melody is good. One beginer mistake is to sing something outside your range or just a song that has too wide a range for you to sing the pitches (pretty much anything done by Freddy Mercury or Brad Delp :)) Don't be afraid to change the key when you are learning to sing.

If you are trying to learn harmony singing, IMO, it's more difficult. You need to understand what note you are wanting to sing relative to the melody. This means learning relative pitch skills. Plus you have to be able to hear the melody note clearly and hear yourself clearly. Not so simple on stage. Think this is a good starter for harmony singing: Amazon.com: Harmony Singing By Ear: Susan Anders: Music

Richard
 
I got the voicelive 2 extreme edition after reading so many good things about it from everyone and yes it is awesome. I think it inspires me to try and sing a little harder, but I'm still working on the sing and play guitar at the same time thing.
As far as a practice tool it does work really well if you have a good monitoring system. I can sing something with the extreme hardtune on a preset and then switch to a preset that is only eq'd and you have to work to get the correct pitch when you get to the edge of your range. you can definatley can find some inspiration in this little box :)
 
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