I have this piece of gear I bought a few years ago, mainly because I really don’t like my voice when singing and figured what the heck, better living through technology. I really was looking to duplicate Jack White’s vocal on some of his tunes. The doubling, the radio transducer stuff, and maybe add reverb and other effects . . as so, listen, it’s subtle, but it’s there.
I like toys and gear, especially music gear. So off to Craigslist I went. I found one for sale for about 1/2 retail from a guy in Cincinnati. So we made arrangements to meet half way or so at a gas station around Wilmington, I think. It came with a pedal as well. What a bargain! I never understood why musicians discount their gear so easily and readily. It’s all electronics. . . More ideas on that later.
The TC Helicon Voice Live Touch 2 is a vocal processing unit that can do all kinds of things to a voice. So many things, in fact, that it’s quite intimidating knowing where to start. Check this out:
It has a ba-jillion presets so I just kind of muddled my way through them. Delay, Reverb, Harmony you can plug in off of the guitar, transducer, doubler, autotune, pitch correction, beat box, looper, and on and on. TC Helicon does an awesome job with their gear and this was no exception. Very useful, and dangerous, in the right hands.
This unit does so many things that I gave it to a lead singer to help make the band sound better. I’m not an expert in setting it up and neither is he. And so it just sits there. To be honest, I was a bit frustrated with him since here was this piece of gear that I just gave him, along with the manual, and they weren’t really using it. My first thought if that were me, at that age, I’d be tearing into the unit to see what it could do and how it could make me sound better. Like I did when I got the unit. Oh, wait a minute. Did I do that? Sort of.
The problem with a lot of music gear is that it’s just not user friendly to use, or not easy enough, or not set up for creative artist type minded to operate intuitively … or musicians are just lazy. Probably all of the the above.
So here we are. Expensive piece of gear not being used.
Then I thought for a minute, well, maybe going through and tweaking things from a manual isn’t really all that easy or appealing. No hands on training, etc. Maybe, the singer would get more out of video training. Ah, maybe we are on to something!
Turns out there is a really excellent video tutorial out there that explains how everything works and where to go into the menus for help.
If you search on YOUTUBE, you can find that TC actually put together a video manual series on all the different features.
It starts here:
There is also an excellent PDF manual available here: VOICELIVE TOUCH 2
I resolved to watch 1 hour of these tutorials and take notes on tips and tricks. No more, no less. What happened was I watched 40 minutes and spent 20 writing this blog entry today. Win win.
Was also able to get back to what some gain settings are that might help tame some of the clipping problems.
I’m anxious to get back to band practice this afternoon and try out some additional settings that were discovered with these videos.
Never give up, there may be another way to learn about something than what you are used to. Keep after it!!
Happy Sunday
-Just a Dude
Just a Dude 