BOSS VE 20

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126 Guitarist December 2010

BOSS VE-20 & TC-HELICON VOICETONE HARMONY-G XT £219 & £205

RECORDING

here was time when it

was only guitarists who

used stompboxes, but

lately vocalists have been

getting in on the act with

specialised pedals that can

generate harmonies, add reverb

and even correct their out of

tune warblings. We’ve already

taken a look at the various

models in the DigiTech Vocalist

range that can automatically

generate vocal harmonies

dependent on an input signal

from your g uitar. Now up for

review are the TC-Helicon

VoiceTone Harmony-G XT,

which does a similar trick, and

the BOSS VE-20, a vocal

processor that doesn’t rely on

a guitar signal.

TC-Helicon

VoiceTone

Harmony-G XT

The Harmony-G XT is the

successor to TC-Helicon’s

Harmony-G vocal effect and

takes some features from the

more upmarket VoiceLive 2. It’s

designed to provide a variety of

effects to enhance any singing

performance including, among

others, harmony generation,

doubling effects, reverb, delay,

compression and automatic

chromatic pitch correction.

Operation of the Harmony-G

XT revolves around 10

programmable presets

arranged in five banks as

variations A and B. You can step

through the banks with the

preset button and switch

between the A or B variations

with the left footswitch. Each

preset can be built up from

several elements. You get two

harmony voices (Voice 1 and

Voice 2), each of which can be

chosen from six options or

simply be inactive. Voice 1 offers

higher, high, low, lower, bass or

octave up harmonies, while

Voice 2 replaces the octave up

option with octave down. You

also can have no effects or a

choice of hall reverb, room

BOSS VE-20 &

TC-Helicon VoiceTone

Harmony-G XT

£219 & £205

These two units are essentially stompboxes for singers

– the guitar’s purely optional by Trevor Curwen

reverb, echo, slap, combi or

SFX. The levels of the effects

and the harmony voices are set

by separate knobs and each of

the effects has selectable

variations. On top of this you

can engage the double button,

which activates a doubling

effect (with four different

options) on your voice that you

can use alone or in tandem with

the harmony voices, and there’s

a tone button that with a single

press adds what TC calls

‘Adaptive Live Engineer

Effects’ – a combination of EQ,

compression, de-essing and

gating – to smooth the vocals. A

double press on the tone button

engages the automatic pitch

correction if you want to add

that in as well.

A thru jack takes the g uitar

signal to your amp, although it

can be mixed in with the voice

signal if required and share the

reverb, the relative levels set by

a knob that has an auto setting

and an area in its travel when

the guitar is muted.

The Rivals

DigiTech’s Vocalist units

provide the obvious rivals to

both pedals, particularly the

Live 3 (£335) and Live 4

(£555) in the case of the

TC-Helicon, which are floor

pedals offering vocal harmony

from guitar input, while the

Vocal 300 (£230) has more in

common with the BOSS. If you

like the idea of the TC-Helicon

but want more sophistication,

the Voicelive 2 (£665) is its

big brother. If you want to

tweak vocals in your recording

software look no further than

the Antares company, who’s

products includes the

notorious Auto-Tune.

GIT336.rev_tc 126 11/8/10 1:00:55 PM

Summary of content (3 pages)

PAGE 1
BOSS VE-20 & TC-HELICON VOICETONE HARMONY-G XT £219 & £205 RECORDING BOSS VE-20 & TC-Helicon VoiceTone Harmony-G XT £219 & £205 These two units are essentially stompboxes for singers – the guitar’s purely optional by Trevor Curwen T here was time when it was only guitarists who used stompboxes, but lately vocalists have been getting in on the act with specialised pedals that can generate harmonies, add reverb and even correct their out of tune warblings.
PAGE 2
BOSS VE-20 & TC-HELICON VOICETONE HARMONY-G XT £219 & £205 RECORDING The idea is that you play your guitar to generate vocal harmonies, although there’s also manual selection of scale and key for singers without an instrument or horn players. You can also use a guitar to manually set a key by playing a chord and holding both footswitches down. TC’s VoiceSupport software is included and is designed for backing up and restoring user presets and installing any updates to the pedal.
PAGE 3
BOSS VE-20 & TC-HELICON VOICETONE HARMONY-G XT £219 & £205 RECORDING The BOSS is a lot of fun, sounds pretty good and will be easy to use onstage by a dedicated front panel button but there are four more buttons, including two cursors, for getting into the menus and editing. The left footswitch is the on/off switch for the overall sound, while the right footswitch is set by default to turn the harmonies on and off, although you can opt to set it to switch other effects within a patch if so desired.