Gear Review: TC-Helicon VoiceTone Create vocal effects pedal
September 28th, 2008
Positive:
- Effects are of reasonable quality.
- Mic preamp is of reasonable quality.
- Puts the performer in control of effects.
- Compact, solidly built metal box.
- It is possible to edit individual parameters and save custom patches.
- Works as advertised after modifications.
Negative:
- Not really suitable for use on stage without modifications (see below for details).
- Patch editing is tedious and not very intuitive.
- No MIDI, so no possibility of editing or backing up patches on a computer.
- The push-hold functionality to switch modes does work, but it takes practice to get it right. I think it would have been better with three stomp switches.
- A/B switching does not appear to cross-fade.
- Tech support was less than helpful in my experience.
When I received the unit, I was impressed by its solid feeling construction. The case seems well built. It does have the normal vulnerability of a PCB-mounted jack for the power connection that could be easily broken if stepped on, but that certainly isn’t unique to this pedal.
One of the first things I wanted to do was mount it on my effects board. There are two screw holes on the bottom, which could only be for mounting. I emailed TC tech-support to ask if they have any mounting brackets avaialble, and if not, what size screws those holes accept.
Their answer? “Most people use Velcro.”
Well, that wasn’t very helpful. Why put mounting holes on it and then fail to document them and suggest using something else? I don’t like using Velcro for pedals, and this one has some perfectly good mounting holes! Ultimately a metal plate was screwed to the bottom to mount the pedal to my board.
On first use, the push-hold switching functionality seemed like it would take some getting used to (and it did). There are five presets, each with an A and B for fast changes within a song. The same switch is used for cycling through 1-5 and for switching from A to B (there are two different modes), so the sequence between songs (for me anyway) is usually something like: press-hold to switch to the preset cycle mode, click through to the correct preset number, then press-hold to switch back to A/B mode. The other switch behaves similarly in that there are two modes, one to bypass the effect, and one to tap tempo, and you must push and hold to switch between the two functions. If you have to tap the tempo at the beginning of a song to sync up the delay time, after selecting the right preset you would then have to press and hold the other switch to enter tap tempo mode (and make sure the effect is enabled first!). If you wanted to then bypass the effect to talk between songs, that would require a second press-hold routine, and then press to bypass.
The most frightening discovery was that when switching between saved presets using the foot switches, the patch number selection appeared to change on its own every now and then! After some trial and error and confusion, I realised that the reason for this is the vastly overly sensitive patch selection knob. The 99 patches are accessed by turning a tiny knob, and changing patches requires such a minute movement that simply tapping the top of the knob (or even other knobs in some cases), even without actually turning it at all, can cause the selected patch to jump by 1-5 numbers!
Once the patch selection is changed, there is no quick way to cancel this change and revert to the patch stored in the saved preset without powering down the unit (impossible to do without sending a deafening pop through the PA). Switching to another preset and switching back retains the last (erroneous) patch selection, even though it hasn’t actually been saved. So in summary, if you step on a stomp switch to change between A and B performances during a song and bump into the knob slightly, or brush against the unit even very lightly with your microphone cable, you could inadvertently cause the patch select knob to jump to another patch in a very embarrassing way, and there is no fast way to change it back, apart from bending down and turning the patch select knob back to wherever it was by hand.
Apart from the obvious difficulty in bending down and fiddling with it mid-song—especially after you’ve just decapitated the audience with a barrage of shrieking feedback caused by switching in an ear-crushing distortion patch during a quiet, solemn musical passage (no, I haven’t done this, but was terrified by the potential for it)—it’s actually very hard to navigate to a particular patch in any precise way because of the way it jumps and skips around.
My solution was to take all the knobs off and have a special cover/guard made for it with holes that will accept a screwdriver if adjustments are necessary, but otherwise are out of reach and protected from any accidental alterations. With this modification in place, I found that it worked quite well on stage, but I would not have attempted to use it live under any circumstances otherwise.
One other flaw lies in the handling of the A/B switching. As mentioned before, you can save presets containing an A and a B selection for easy switching during a song, so you can use one effect on one section and another effect on another section and to swap back and forth between the two. Good idea, and it works OK most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to cross-fade. You can’t really switch a delay in mid-word or mid-phrase without an unpleasant glitch; it switches on hard rather than fading up, so if you want to do things like add a long delay tail to the last word of a verse you’ll need another solution.
Patch editing is profoundly nerdy and is not for the faint of heart. It’s all done by adjusting the numeric values of 99 separate parameters using the knobs. There’s no MIDI or USB, so after going through all that you can’t even back up your settings. There’s a separate manual for the editing mode, but it is very basic, cryptic at times, and by no means comprehensive. I was curious about the signal flow and about some of the parameters in the manual, and so I asked TC. They basically said they didn’t know. Nowhere in the documentation is there a diagram of the signal path through all the effects. Having a diagram to refer to rather than having to guess would be most helpful, as it is quite complex and involves lots of sends and returns and feedback paths.
In summary, I think despite some serious flaws, it’s pretty good value for the money and does the job if you want some reasonable sounding delays, reverbs, thickening, etc. that you can control on stage. It’s better than relying on an unknown engineer to switch your effects in and out at the appropriate times, and it’s more convenient than carrying yet another a 19″ rack full of stuff around. However, I advise very strongly against using it on stage without covering the knobs. Not doing so could potentially mean disaster.
This review might be more useful after downloading and reading the manual for the pedal. Here’s a link to TC-Helicon’s page about this product: http://www.tc-helicon.com/VoiceToneCreate.asp
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