For who is not aware of that, TC Helicon is the division of the well-known TC Electronics that deals with voice effects. There are vocal effects around, but far fewer than for guitar. Also, unlike guitar effects, finding vocal effects that actually work is difficult.
The TC Helicon Voicelive Play (link: https://www.tc-helicon.com/product.html?modelCode=P0DEH) is a voice multi-effect of undisputed quality. In addition to having many effects, they are practically all valid and of great quality. All enclosed in a chassis that is comfortable to carry around and resistant.
Technical specifications
The TC Helicon Voicelive Play has tons of features and effects that you may never even use:
• Tone, Harmony (with Auto Key Detection), HardTune, Reverb, Double, etc.
• Input for MP3 player, or streaming and recording tracks on USB including voice delete function
• Compatible with MP-75 Microphone with Control Mic
• Adaptive Global EQ, Compression, De-Ess, Gate & Pitch Correction
• 2 Voices of NaturalPlay Harmonies, and 2 voices of humanized Doubling
• Looper VLoop with undo / redo
• RoomSense microphones for AutoKey, monitoring and training
• Ignore tones manually using the pedals or the Effects menu
• Browse over 200 presets by genre and mark your Favorites
• Intelligent Practice function with intelligent display of singing statistics
• Simple customization of effects styles and icons
• Low noise mic-preamp with Mic Control
• Stereo XLR outputs
• Aux input for connecting an MP3 player
• Headphone output
• USB for audio streaming and connection to VoiceSupport
• Optional Switch-3 and MP-75 for greater performance control
• Dimensions: 200 x H45 x 156mm
• Weight: 0.95kg
Sound and usability
The programming of the TC Helicon Voicelive Play is not always intuitive, a feature common to all multi-effects, but with the instruction manual, freely downloadable from the Internet at the TC Helicon website, it doesn’t take long. moreover, you can save your presets on your pc, for a backup in case of need.
The sound is really great. As with any effect, unless you want to create situations with extreme reverbs or auto-tune-style pitch corrections, its contribution must be heard and not heard, that is, it must be present but hidden at the same time. For example, the pitch corrector works great, but you shouldn’t overuse it if you want to keep its presence from being noticed, in order to keep an original sound anyway.
The effects that I personally use in my setup are the reverb, the pitch corrector (kept very light, it adds an extra body to the voice), a light compressor (also very useful for balancing the proximity effect of the microphone) and both the doubler, just to get some extra push in some chorus. Stop.
Trust me, with these very few effects the voice changes without being distorted. It improves, and also a lot, without however that the interventions of the TC Helicon Voicelive Play are invasive. You can hear it more the moment you turn it off, as I think it must be a good voice effect.
Here you can find a video that illustrates it well:
Conclusions
The TC Helicon Voicelive Play is a great multi-effects processor for vocals. Lightweight and robust, it contains an infinite number of sounds.
Pro: construction, portability, sounds, inputs / outputs, additional functions.
Cons: price, 12 V power supply (needs its own separate power supply.
It’s not that expensive, but it’s not really cheap either. Compared to a guitar multi-effects, however, it doesn’t cost too much either. On music market or reverb.com is used for about 200 euros.
In my opinion, the quality is worth the price it costs, especially when used. Personally I recommend it to all those singers, amateurs or professionals who are, who want a great sounding voice effect, easy enough to program and portable. Furthermore, its pedal activation could allow it to be integrated into a guitar pedalboard (large, perhaps like the Behringer PB1000).
Try it, at most you can always resell it;)
Published on musicanza.it on: 11/27/2021.
