Question About TC Helicon VoiceWorks

[soupking]

I'm looking at getting a signal harmonizer, somebody on GS recommended the VoiceWorks.

I was curious does the VoiceWorks unit have the ability to pitch-shift? I'd really like a box that can do that as well as harmonize a chorus at varying intervals.

Is this the right way to go?

Does anybody know?

[Kiwiburger]

Why not read their website ... Introduction

They have MP3 demos and everything. Some of their cheaper products might also do what you want.

I see this as more of a live tool - for studio I would use software like Melodyne.

If you simply want a pitch shift chorus, most DAWs have pitchshifting build in, and it's as simple as cloning two tracks and shifting them up and down about 9 cents and panning left and right.

Personally - I'm not so much enamoured with pitch shift chorus. A very slow chorus gives a similar effect (especially if you can choose a square-ish LFO) with less artifacts.

[soupking]

Yeah, I'm recording to tape, so I won't be using a DAW.

I'm trying to find a way to record an instrument and build it into to different ones at the same time using pitch-bending and multiple alternate micing/EQ.

[Kiwiburger]

So why not use your tape varispeed? Even cheap four tracks have varispeed.

For the price of that TC stuff you could buy a PC and a good soundcard and free or low cost software that can do millions of tricks. Even if you only use it as a standalone effects processor.

[soupking]

Well, the problem with changes the tape speed is that it'd lose synch with the other tracks wouldn't it?

Software sounds nice but I'm not going to be recording to disk for a year or two.

Thanks though.

[Kiwiburger]

No - tape varispeed is simply the motor speed of the tape machine. So if you have multiple tracks, and you speed the motor up or down, they all stay in sync together.

For example - you could record a guitar or piano backing track, and a regular vocal line. Then you could drop the speed, and the pitch of everything goes down. Record a second vocal, singing in a lower range, and then when you set the speed to normal you will have a second vocal track that sounds different - probably more 'female' in character. That's because the 'formants' (distinctive resontant frequencies) of your voice are all shifted up. You could then do the reverse, by speeding up the backing track and effectively pitching down your vocal, making more bassy or 'male' than before.

Digital pitch shifting gives more control, because you can also compensate for time and for formants. With tape varispeed, everything moves together - speeding up shortens the time and raises the pitch and formants. Digital can use algorithmns to compensate by time-stretching and formant shifting. Sometimes it's not too successful and glitches happen - especially if it's trying to calculate it all in realtime. Offline processing can take it's time to do a better job.

Have a listen to the demo at Clone Ensemble, and see what you can do with really cheap software on a PC.
Edit: If money is the problem, you have more chance of somebody giving you an old spare PC than somebody giving you an old spare TC-Helicon VoiceWorks

[soupking]

No - tape varispeed is simply the motor speed of the tape machine. So if you have multiple tracks, and you speed the motor up or down, they all stay in sync together.

For example - you could record a guitar or piano backing track, and a regular vocal line. Then you could drop the speed, and the pitch of everything goes down. Record a second vocal, singing in a lower range, and then when you set the speed to normal you will have a second vocal track that sounds different - probably more 'female' in character. That's because the 'formants' (distinctive resontant frequencies) of your voice are all shifted up. You could then do the reverse, by speeding up the backing track and effectively pitching down your vocal, making more bassy or 'male' than before.

Awesome, I'll have to try that out. I'll need to set up some kind of guide so I know where the pitches are.

Thanks Kiwiburger!

[patrox247]

Soupking....DO NOT TRY THAT!tutt

[soupking]

Originally Posted by patrox247

Soupking....DO NOT TRY THAT!tutt

K

[patrox247]

Good...I'm glad we got that settled.

[soupking]

Originally Posted by patrox247

Good...I'm glad we got that settled.

[ShadowAMD]

Originally Posted by Kiwiburger

Why not read their website ... Introduction

They have MP3 demos and everything. Some of their cheaper products might also do what you want.

I see this as more of a live tool - for studio I would use software like Melodyne.

If you simply want a pitch shift chorus, most DAWs have pitchshifting build in, and it's as simple as cloning two tracks and shifting them up and down about 9 cents and panning left and right.

Personally - I'm not so much enamoured with pitch shift chorus. A very slow chorus gives a similar effect (especially if you can choose a square-ish LFO) with less artifacts.

Now I have a beefy setup to say I'm not a millionaire, but I just don't really trust DAW's yet to be able to perform as well as a hardware unit when It's doing so many other jobs. E.g A console is for playing games, a phone is for making calls.. They try to put all this crap into one, it does not work well. That's why Reason are against using VST's in there suite's because they are not that stable and they can cause issues, melodyne included.

I reccomend the Voiceworks, I use it and think it's great. I'm lucky to never really go out of pitch. Once I did a gig with a cold and used pitch correction and no-one noticed thanks to the voiceworks so I gather it does a good job.. It's good for recording and live, there are better products but I gather you don't want to spend 10k plus.

[S2udio]

Originally Posted by Dannyvect

They try to put all this crap into one, it does not work well.

Absolute piffle........
We have dual and quad core machines nowadays.....not commadores or spectrums

Although mainly hardware based,i also use a good specced DAW..
Completely stable..and works very well using cubase
Reason is for bedroom wannabees

[cjogo]

Can the verb /delays be used independently ?? Sans pitch parameters ...

[Yfoiler]

I use the TC Helicon Voiceworks Plus. It will do what you want. BTW, simple DAW pitch shifting in the box won't give you separate "voices" for each harmony part. You'll end up with four of the same people singing the harmony. In the Helicon you can take a single voice and turn it into four different people, (anything from kids voices to grannies, male to female, black to white and everything in between) there are just WAY too many parameters to go into here, but go to TC's website and download the manual. Listen to their demos. Some people think their presets are just fine, but you can do some amazing stuff if you start messing with each voice in that machine.

Be aware there is processing latency of about 4 ms, so you'll have to find a way to deal with that if you're going to tape. I use mine with the DAW Reaper and it automatically compensates for the delay. Also, sometimes I just manually slide the track a we bit to make up for it.

The way I use it is to control the parts is with MIDI. I set each voice in the Helicon up on a different MIDI channel, and then in the DAW MIDI Editor I just write the notes into the piano roll. That helps a lot to reduce the processing time because the engine doesn't have to analyze the chord first and then determine the harmony parts. I tell it ahead of time what the harmony parts are. If you have trouble writing harmony parts you can to the same thing with the TC Guitar controller driving the MIDI into the Helicon. The way you do that is easy. Just record an electric guitar track dry, and very clean just playing simple strumming chord changes, nothing complicated as you won't use this track for anything but having the TC guitar controller convert it to MIDI notes automatically . Then on playback of this dry guitar track you feed that tracks audio output into the guitar controller and guitar controller outputs the correct MIDI voicings for that chord into the Helicon VoiceWorks...a really neat way to go for those not too experienced in writing moving harmonies. Again to simplify: Record a dry guitar track. Then playback that tracks audio into the TC guitar controller's input. The TC guitar controller's MIDI output is connected via MIDI cable to the TC Helicon's MIDI input. That's it. Like I said, download the manual.

As of late I've been experimenting with Vielklang. It's VST is a bit buggy for me now, but I'm not giving up on it. It has a very nice intellegent engine and the voices sound pretty good---when it isn't crashing my system.

Good luck.

[cjogo]

Originally Posted by Yfoiler

I use the TC Helicon Voiceworks Plus. It will do what you want. .

So we can get a true stereo reverb only -- no pitch ? Or a delay out one side and a reverb out the other ?? We have 3 other TC units and love the ease of control and the tru-twin engines..thanks

[Yfoiler]

Yeah, there are some generic verb and delay patches in there but it's NOT like the TC 2000 or 3000 where you can have a verb on one input and a delay on the other. Go to the TC Helicon website and you can download the manual to see the patches that it has. Good luck...

[cjogo]

thanks -- was hoping for a M 2000 with pitch