Any experience with MIDI controlled vocal harmonies?

[FXM]

I've just joined a Queen tribute band, and the previous keyboard player used a vocal harmoniser with MIDI input to augment the vocals, and they want me to do the same. I've never done anything like that before, so I was wondering if anybody on here had any recommendations or tips?

 

The only product that I could find that looks suitable is the Roland VT-4 (https://www.musictech.net/reviews/roland-vt-4-voice-transformer/). Any feedback on that or suggestions for alternatives?

 

Neil

 

[ElmerJFudd]

If you are gigging a laptop with a MIDI controller with something like iZotope Nectar will do this for you in real time, or to pre-recorded vocal tracks.

 

[video:youtube]

 

Also a second hand Roland V-Synth GT

 

[video:youtube]

 

[RedKey]

Discontinued, but readily available 2nd hand is the TC Helicon Harmony M.

[arX]

^ I found latency to be an issue with Nectar and Nectar 2 in real-time processing (playing through midi). I don't know if this has been fixed in Nectar 3.

[ElmerJFudd]

^ I found latency to be an issue with Nectar and Nectar 2 in real-time processing (playing through midi). I don't know if this has been fixed in Nectar 3.

 

I assume this would be dependent also upon the in/out latency that the computer+audio interface is capable of, ya?

 

You happen to know if this feature requires the full version of Nectar 3?

[hardware]

TC Voice Lives are what we use.

A pair of them.

I change presets for the vocalists, kick off and on delays, etc.

They sound really good and the cheapest one with the least bells and whistles is fine.

I bought a pair used for 400 USD.

18 months of use and Id recommend them to any band with a competent MIDI Controller.

 

We have 2 lead singers and I was tired of hearing 2 voices.

Since I hate singing I felt my opinion was unworthy unless I provided a solution.

Naturally they cringed but realized resistance was futile.

 

Our main vocalist has a fantastic voice, but doesnt take well to criticism, and after 2 x 45s she starts singing flat.

Thats easy to fix with a 75% ratio of wet/dry mix pitch correction.

Now if shes flat it sounds like a great vocal effect, especially if its a unison/correction combo.

 

No offense to vocalists as I could never sing for hours every night.

But since its constructive criticism.

Singing flat is from a lack of endurance, laziness, or not hearing yourself.

 

Now she hears in her IEMs when she starts going flat and these FX really do help.

Its like a drummer lacking good meter getting lessons from a click track.

They too will complain its a machine and its not perfect.

True dat, but it sure beats a drummer with bad meter.

[Danny Linguini]

Discontinued, but readily available 2nd hand is the TC Helicon Harmony M.

Oh yeah. I used one of these with a 4-piece band and in a duo - fantastic little unit, simple to operate, and results were outstanding.

[psionic11]

+0.5 on the Voice Live. I have this preset on mine that lets me sing all the parts to the intro/chorus of The Eagles "Seven Bridges Road."

You will have to program your vocal FX in and use the footswitches to change patches or stomp certain FX (delay, harmony, etc) on or off.

This is TC Helicon's flagship, and it's aimed at the solo guitar/singer, with one layer dedicated to vocal FX, one layer to guitar FX, and one layer to looping.

 

[video:youtube]

 

However, instead of getting the flagship, you can also get the more streamlined Performance VK:

Its programming options are more limited, but you get more practical results more quickly.

This is aimed more at the vocalist who will be playing keys.

 

[video:youtube]

 

Both the Voice Live and the Perform VK create harmonies using several different sources to determine the key.

There's built-in mic to hear and analyze what key you're in

There's audio in from keyboard/guitar to guide harmony.

And there's direct MIDI input ("notes mode").

 

This last device is really fun, as it's geared more to experimental vocal FX while playing keys.

At its heart it takes on the fly samples and you can immediately play the keyboard with your samled vocals.

It defaults to using MIDI input. This means you play the keyboard to detemine the harmony notes. You can create a small keyboard range to dedicate to controlling harmony.

Like the VK, this Performance VE is limited, but may be more in line with having to create the vocal FX types in Bohemian Rhapsody.

 

[video:youtube]

 

 

 

 

 

[hardware]

I use no switches, just MIDI CC#s.

Program Change messages trigger presets with bypass or harmony on the fly, they have really good MIDI but they were way ahead of the game way back when.

I hated holding down a harmony note/s on an empty zone. A waste of a good hand but I had a rep for vocal fox automations as far back as 1985 when I was a kid with the Alexis MIDI FX.

Low fidelity but gave us the edge live.

 

Odd that my PCM 70 was unusable as the 1 second it took t load a preset was unacceptable live.

The cheap ass MIDI Verb and MIDI FX were the very first units that could be automated.

 

 

 

[MikeT156]

I played as a solo act for years. Back in the Dark Ages I used an MXR Pitch Transposer. Later, I bought a Digitech VHM (or something like that) and kept it on top of my KB. It sounded Bit like chipmunks, but it worked out well for the period of time we were at electronically.

 

In the early 2000's I bought the Digitech Vocalist PRO. A rack mount Harmonizer that allowed me to select the KEY I was playing in, the vocal Interval(s) how many "voices" I wanted to have in addition to mine. I was able to change intervals within a song to change what harmonies I wanted, so it was really versatile. I used a MIDI track on my sequencer to feed the midi information to the Vocalist, so I didn't have to play the keyboard to generate the harmonies during a song. I used a foot switch to turn the Harrnonizer on and off instead of having to insert CC messages everywhere in every song. I kept it simple.

 

That way i could play my KB parts without having to be tied to a harmonizer. I found that you could only play straight chords or it would through the Harmonizer off. Midi tracks from a sequencer was the way to go for me, but a band would need to use a click track to make sure the Harmonizer was synchronized with the song.

 

Back in those days the TC Helicon was widely used, but I found their units a bit difficult to operate. Digitech's Pro unit was a better option for me personally, but TC Helicon was definitely a major player.

 

The TC Helicon Unit in the video is inexpensive, and appears to all the KB to play chords without jumping around and ruining the vocals. It looks like a unit to demo to see if it fits what you want to do. Apparently it only sings what you sing, like most other Harmonizers. I don't know that will work for Queen Songs??

 

 

 

Mike T.

[The_Star_Guy]

Very timely thread! I have had my eye on the Perform VK lately as well, and was strongly considering picking one up at Gearfest after talking with the TC Helicon rep. I would love to hear more personal experiences about this unit from anyone currently using it!

[RudyS]

our singer has a TC voiclive (3?). This picks up the harmony's from her guitar. Maybe you can use that for keyboard as well?

 

In terms of hardware voice effects, I think TC is about the only company that makes those.

[Tusker]

TC Voice Lives are what we use.

A pair of them.

I change presets for the vocalists, kick off and on delays, etc.

They sound really good and the cheapest one with the least bells and whistles is fine.

I bought a pair used for 400 USD.

18 months of use and Id recommend them to any band with a competent MIDI Controller.

 

+1 I've found the TC products to be a notch above the Roland and Digitech products, all of which I have used from time to time. (Caveat: I have not used the Roland VP 550/770 keyboards, which I hear are very good.) When these vocal harmonizers are mixed behind good vocals with good gainstaging, for simple background stacks, etc they can sound excellent. They can turn to &^%^$ in the wrong hands or when asked to do something more than what they are designed to do. The TC products (particularly voice live) in my experience are the most forgiving. YMMV.

 

If I had to do it today, I would look at the software options because the vocal signal is so much more customizable/controllable in software.

[Tusker]

Oh because you can never have too much Don Lewis in a thread ....

 

 

[video:youtube]E_sBi_ciNhk

 

 

[keyman27]

I used a TC Harmony M for years, mostly just to amuse myself, not on gigs. Then it stopped working, and I got TC's big VoiceLive 3 extreme. That was a lot of fun, but kind of overwhelming. Eventually I got the Perform VK. The VK is better in some ways than the old Harmony M, but it is not user-friendly and kind of limited.

[EscapeRocks]

Love the TC Helicon Voice Live 2 and 3.

 

I have the 2. It can take a midi feed from your keyboard, and/or audio inputs from your board.

 

You can also program it per song, how you want the voices setup, which intervals, etc...

 

As Hardware mentioned, it accepts MIDI Program change, so when I would call up a new song on the keyboard, the Voicelive would go to the proper patch or bypass, depending what I needed. It was the keyboard player for the Steve Augeri Band (former Journey singer) who turned me onto the Voicelive.

 

It takes a LONG time to set it up properly, but if you have patience, it seamless.

[Bill H.]

I also used a TC Voice Live for years. It was a rack mount but can't remember which one (a kid has it now). You can use these things in a lot of different ways depending on what you need and how you like to work. We always had backing tracks at this point, so I recorded the harmony parts we wanted from the keyboard beforehand as a midi file routed to the TC, then attached it to the rest of the song. That way the parts came in at the right time and were always exactly what we wanted - doubling, harmonies, whatever - and the harmonies were always correct with no funny notes. The unit worked silently in the background in the rack, and didn't need any kind of attention all night.

 

Like David said it takes awhile to set up right. I've seen way too many acts use them as a stomp box with varying results - usually bad.

[ElmerJFudd]

Are yall saying this TC Voice can voice out the harmony from MIDI keyboard note input in real time? Havent watched the vids yet.

[Bill H.]

^ Yeah basically we'd send it a vocal feed from the mixer's aux send, and a midi feed from the computer. The unit is totally silent and doesn't do anything unless it sees a midi note, then it springs to life and harmonizes the vocal to that note. I preferred to do this as an attached midi file to the track rather than playing the parts from the keyboard live, but you could also do it that way.

[FXM]

Thanks for the responses! The fact that you can ask a question and get so many expert replies is what makes this forum so great.

 

I should probably add that I dont sing lead vocals and all band members sing backing. The vocal effects unit is to thicken the sound on songs where the original has massive layers of backing vocals. Also, I need to cover the vocoder part on Radio Ga Ga (

at 1:00).

 

The TC Voicelive 2 and 3 both look good. How do those two compare in terms of vocoder capability?

 

Neil

[ElmerJFudd]

^ Yeah basically we'd send it a vocal feed from the mixer's aux send, and a midi feed from the computer. The unit is totally silent and doesn't do anything unless it sees a midi note, then it springs to life and harmonizes the vocal to that note. I preferred to do this as an attached midi file to the track rather than playing the parts from the keyboard live, but you could also do it that way.

 

Got it. Frees you up to play keys and not just voicing for the harmonies.

Obviously better if at least 3 can sing in the band. But at least youve got a way to make it happen.

[Threadslayer]

This is probably of no practical use to anybody, but I had the PLG-100VH vocal harmonizer plug in for my Yamaha S90. It sounded great, but what always amazed me about it was how smart the harmonizing algorithm was. I never had to learn how to play with it, it just organically tracked my playing and built appropriate harmonies over whatever I threw at it. I don't recall ever hearing it "sing" a false note.

[Quai34]

I plan to buy a second voice live rack used for my second lead singer so, I won't bother which one will get to use he first one that I removed recently from the studio to put it on the vocalist rack.

Yes, I tprigrammed several patches for specific songs and for pop/Dance/Funk, when the vocals are heavily processed, it work great:

The guitar goes to it before going to the guitarist pedalboard and I have it midied as well, so, it receives programs changes AND midi at the same time....which means that, when your guitarist is taking kind of little gimmick/solo, which is a lot on Funk, sometimes, the Natural Play algorithm, NP, could loose a bit the harmonies, not at all when midi take over the guitar....You see the logo NP and Midi on e screen and you know it receives both so yes, definitely a very good product, but yes, go for TC, I was disappointed with the other brands products...