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James... « Great for live vocals and harmonies »
Published on 08/03/11 at 09:48I tour part of the year with a progressive metal band. We have a lead singer that actually sings. His vocal needs a complex. We needed a unit that could give an octave above and below what he was singing, while giving him a hefty amount of reverb. And we needed to be able to use it live. We ended up going with this unit. There are a lot of effects available. Guitar effects. Delay, reverb, and all kinds of pitching options. All we needed was the dual octave effect and some spacey reverb. The editing is easy enough and the features available are enormous. The unit has XLR, 1/4 inch, and midi which is all great to have. I can see this unit working into any vocal and even guitar situation. Obviously a big plus is the fact that it's a floor unit so our singer could turn off his octave effects for clean parts.
UTILIZATION
The editing, at least for our simple uses was fine. On the surface, voicelive is easy to dial in. It tries hard to have the feel of an analog unit. If you so wish however, you can go deeper and tweak it heavily. Be warned, it isn't an easy unit to dive into. The core sounds are simple enough to use, which is great for beginners or on the fly use, but advanced usage of voicelive is no cakewalk. The manual is good though, so learning the ins and outs is made easier in that respect. I'm guessing that 80% of users will never get into the deeper menus so I'll give it an 8
SOUND QUALITY
The sound quality as expected is wonderful. With the reverbs alone this would be a great unit. Our singer really likes the washes he can get from it. They can be as dry or as wet as you prefer. It's hard to dial in a bad reverb sound. The octaves were our main concern as this IS our singer's sound. Fortunately they were perfect right out of the box. We didn't have to do any tweaking. It just sounded spot on.
The biggest compliment I've heard from my singer is how transparent it sounds. He actually wants to use it on the next album because he thinks it sounds better than the software we used to use for our vocal effects. I think I agree.
OVERALL OPINION
It's expensive but well worth it if you need all the functionality. I can't really fault it in any way. It just does it all. Get one.
UTILIZATION
The editing, at least for our simple uses was fine. On the surface, voicelive is easy to dial in. It tries hard to have the feel of an analog unit. If you so wish however, you can go deeper and tweak it heavily. Be warned, it isn't an easy unit to dive into. The core sounds are simple enough to use, which is great for beginners or on the fly use, but advanced usage of voicelive is no cakewalk. The manual is good though, so learning the ins and outs is made easier in that respect. I'm guessing that 80% of users will never get into the deeper menus so I'll give it an 8
SOUND QUALITY
The sound quality as expected is wonderful. With the reverbs alone this would be a great unit. Our singer really likes the washes he can get from it. They can be as dry or as wet as you prefer. It's hard to dial in a bad reverb sound. The octaves were our main concern as this IS our singer's sound. Fortunately they were perfect right out of the box. We didn't have to do any tweaking. It just sounded spot on.
The biggest compliment I've heard from my singer is how transparent it sounds. He actually wants to use it on the next album because he thinks it sounds better than the software we used to use for our vocal effects. I think I agree.
OVERALL OPINION
It's expensive but well worth it if you need all the functionality. I can't really fault it in any way. It just does it all. Get one.