Hello vocalists and music lovers my name is
Christina Sing and i'm from the band DESTINEAK. Welcome to our music inspiration
series Future Live Musicians. In this episode we're going to show you how to
make your voice stand out using a vocal effects pedal. I'm going to show you how to use reverb,
delay, doubling, tuning, gating, and compression with the Tc Helicon VoiceLive Pedal. This unit
has been on stage with us for over 200 shows. From small parties to large
arenas, it always sounds amazing and it is super reliable. I'll be demonstrating
this pedal with some of our own songs so you can listen along. Feel free to use the presets I show
you and have fun. Future Live Musicians, let's go from studio to stage! I just want to inspire
you first without getting into much detail, so let's hit the mic and sing some songs and see how
this thing sounds. This is our song called "I Feel the Love" it's a big kind of pop dance track. Some parts I want to sound extra juicy
on this song, so I have a delay patch. For this next example, I'm going to show you a
setting that if you are doing pop or trap vocals and you have lots of syllables going on, that might
work for you, because you can't use too much reverb if you're telling a story like that. You want
to be front and center. Also I have a really small just slappy delay so it's not like traveling
on and making your voice sound really muddy while it's echoing on top of it. So let's check it out.
I'll sing a little bit of the verse and then put the HIT button on for those lower octaves for
the chorus.
this next one is our song called "When You Love Somebody." It's kind of a mid-tempo pop track.
Actually for this example let me show you a little bit of what it would sound like without it.
when you love somebody more than yourself you're And now listen
to "When You Love Somebody" with the juice. At the end of this song I usually have a big
note that I sing that propels me from the bridge into the last chorus. It's super long so I add
some wetness to it to make it really stand out. Alright this is another
fun one. Tons of effects on it. This is our song called "Up So
High" it's a big trance track, so i have it really ethereal
and really thick sounding. If you're loving this content and you're finding
it useful, please like, comment, and subscribe. It really helps us, help you, on your journey
to the stage. Let's get this baby powered on. This unit doesn't have an on and off button
it is just powered on when you plug it in. Plug it in there. Screen should light up. Then,
you take an XLR cable, plug it into the 'mic in.' Take the other end of that
cable, and plug it into your mic. Take some headphones, and plug them into there. You
wouldn't really use headphones out of this live, this is just for you to start playing around
with it at home. Now if you want to record your rehearsals, which I highly encourage you to do,
take two XLR cables, plug them into the right out, left out, and then take the other end and
go into your mixer or your sound interface. These two cables are also the same ones you
would send to your sound tech to get to the front of house. Okay, so the next thing you need to
do when you first get this unit, is to sound check your mic level input. So I have ours taped off here
because you don't really want to get this knocked on stage and have it go too quiet or too loud. So
for soundcheck you might want to just hold down this HIT button, which bypasses all of the effects,
so just you're working with the clean signal here. See how it's tickling the green ? So
that means you're getting a good level. And now you want to overdrive it and just back it
off to where it needs to be. "Hey" I'm too loud. "Hey hey." So your loud notes, THE loudest notes,
you should be only going to orange, and never red. Red means you're clipping. Now that you
have it plugged in and you can hear yourself, let's go through setting this up. So you set it
up with global settings first. Global settings just stay. They set and forget. They allow you to
get a nice clean powerful signal before you even start adding effects. SETUP (button). If you want to change
anything just push the button right next to it, and then use this toggle wheel, right? So for INPUT,
I have 'DYNAMIC MIC'. ROOM SENSE, I have 'AMBIENT.' The guitar is at 12 db, sometimes I do play guitar.
MIC CONTROL: N/A. I set my TONE STYLE to 'NORMAL.' Normal tone style adds compression and
gating. Compression levels the vocal out and makeS sure your vocal sits in the mix. It brings all
the quiet stuff up and the super loud stuff down. Gate takes a lot of the ambient noise out of the
signal. So like any ruffling in the room or like the guitar player plugging in his thing over
there, it can get really messy and muddy in the mix, so consider a gate like a door. It won't open up
unless you give it enough signal. PITCH CORRECTION I have it set at 30 %. OUTPUT I have it at
'STEREO'. VOCAL CANCEL, I turn it 'OFF.' LEAD MUTE is 'OFF' USB OUT LEVEL is '0 db.' HEADPHONE LIMITER is
at '-5 db.' LCD CONTRAST I just have it '1.' FUNCTION UP/DOWN: ' LOOPING.' LEAD DELAY: 'NONE.' TUNE REFERECNEC is '440.' PITCH PIPE LEVEL is at '0.' AUX IN type is 'TRACKS.' GLOBAL KEY is 'OFF.' GLOBAL TEMPO
is 'OFF.' This is really important because you are going to go in and set tempos and keys for certain
songs. GLOBAL GUITAR EFFECTS are 'ON.' GUITAR GATE is 'OFF' at the moment. MIC BOOST is 'LOW.' ROOM SENSE LOW CUT is at '45 hz.' INPUT is 'LEAD + GUITAR.' UNDO is 'ON.' LOOP FEEDBACK is at '0.'
percent midi chain three cc chain two SPLIT DRIVE is 'ABOVE.' FILTER is 'NONE.'
TRANSPOSE is at '0.' SPLIT NOTE is 'C-1.' SYSEXID (I think that's what that says) is '1.'
PB RANGE is '2.' MIDI CONTROL is 'MERGE.' CONTROL 'CUSTOM.' HARD MOMENT 'OFF.' DELAY MOMENT
'OFF.' SWITCH 1 is set to 'REVERB.' SWITCH 2 is set to 'GUITAR DELAY.' SWITCH 3 is set to 'LOOP RECORD/PLAY.'
I don't use this unit for looping so i think those are just inoperable at
the moment, so it doesn't really matter. and that's it. Please feel free to go research and
learn as much about this unit as possible. Today I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of
what every button does, because it would take hours. I just want to inspire
you with some of our settings, and get you up and going. When you first get the
unit it's going to come with a bunch of presets. I advise you to go in and sing into a couple. See
what's inspiring, and then find a preset that you think sounds pretty good,and then copy it
to an empty preset. Here, 'TGIF' I think this one emulates Katy Perry's TGIF song. If it's
good enough for her, it's good enough for us! Pretty inspiring. And then I advise you to store it
somewhere else. STORE (button). Press it once, then you go to the number you want to store it to. For
now let's store it to 241. Press STORE (button), and then go back to STORE (button), because you want to
rename it. So if you want to rename it, go to SETUP (button). It lets you toggle through the letters. So
let's name it FLM for Future Live Musicians. Store again. Okay now you have a new preset
and now let's go in talk about some of this stuff. Vocal Delay is an echo of your voice. The
notes that you make are repeated back to you. The longer you want them to keep repeating back
to you, the higher you dial the 'feedback.' In this preset they have it OFF, so here you want to
turn it ON. You also have another option to have a hit button. So it's OFF until you hit this (HIT) button. For this we're going to leave it ON. Okay
-10 db is too much. I usually have mine set around -30 db for
just stock singing verses and stuff. Feedback maybe around 40 %. You can also play with
the rhythm that you want it to slap back to you. Right now it's set to quarter (note). You
can toggle through different types of slap. That's a quarter. But
you can also play with lots of different timing. Faster. So if you want to change the type of delay
you're using, press this EFFECT button down, it'll bring you to this screen. Changing the
effect. Go to there. Highlight that. So very important if you're going
to use delay, set it to the tempo of your song. So go to TEMPO. Find out what BPM you're at it. It just
keeps the slaps in time. If you're happy with that, store. Store. And then go back into EFFECTS (button) to go
to another page. Let's go to the reverb page. Reverb is the persistence of sound after it happens. It
decays after it's absorbed by surfaces. It allows your voice to blend in with the music around it, by
filling in the spaces between the notes. Big reverb can make you sound really far away and no reverb
will make you sound super close up. Let's explore the type of reverbs that are available in this box.
So use the toggle to give you different settings. I just like to use a bright plate most of
the time. A bright plate sounds nice. But I have the level set pretty low. Okay, alright. Store. Let's go to the HARMONY page. There you go. Harmonies add texture to your voice
and thickness. When you get to the stage you want to kind of emulate that "recorded sound" as much as
possible, so you want to add thickening harmonies when you can. It is very important if
you're going to be using harmonies to - you can either use "AUTO KEY" but I like to be
a little more precise because I like t o use tuning as well. So this is where you set the key
of your song. If you're using tuning, this HARMONY Page, even if you're not using harmonies,
this is where you're going to set your key. Let's explore some of these settings. Alright, so sometimes you
just want a thicker signal, and there's lots of options for
doubling here. One voice really tight. And then I also like to
use octave lower. You can also do octaves up.
Two voices doing an octave down. Let's go to the tuning page. Okay so tuning is
just that. It tunes your vocals live. This box is actually really great real time. But listen, this
is not going to be the savior for all your tuning problems. You have to actually be pretty precise
or else it'll go to the next wrong note. It won't sound good. You still have to sing in tune. This
just tucks you up to the note. Everyone is really really used to hearing things sounding gridded
on the radio. So the first one they give you is 'POP.' COUNTRY GLISS, now this if
you do want an auto-tune kind of effect, it's a little bit less jumpy than that POP one. The ROBOT one will make you sound like a
robot. Alright, this is the one that I use. So remember if you're gonna use 'NATURAL TUNING', this will go to the scale that you're in.
So remember, you have to set the key that you're going to sing in, in HARMONY MODE.
Okay so I already set it to the key of C So it's almost barely recognizable, it's there
helping you along. Here is CHROMATIC. I don't really use chromatic, you could. I think it's kind
of unpredictable. Let's go to the next page and this is the TRANSDUCER. It's kind of like having a
megaphone. This one brings out the punk rock side in me. I'm like Britney Spears in the 90s. I don't use this one very often, because I find
that it does make the mic feedback a lot on stage. This is the guitar page. The VoiceLive Play allows
you to plug your guitar in. If you do want to use a guitar, plug it into this 'INSTRUMENT IN' input. The
last thing I want to cover is this BYPASS TO TALK. If you hold it down, it bypasses the effects for when you want to talk. So hey I'm finishing my song... Hold it down. It turns off the effects you can
talk, tell a story to the audience, without being all washy. Hit it. Everything comes back on. I
can't stress this enough. To get the most out of this unit, record your rehearsals. Listen to what it
sounds like, and then go back and tweak and adjust. Keep tweaking that recipe until you get the
sauciest vocals you can. Just a quick note on sound checking this unit live. Always make sure
to check a kind of a "less wet patch" and then a "really wet patch" to make sure that you give the
sound tech the scope of what you're going to be doing. Sometimes some of these effects add a lot
of top end, and it can make your mic feedback in the middle of your set, and you don't want to
have that happen. You want to have that happen at sound check, and then correct any EQing that needs
to happen. Alright, thank you so much for watching this episode all the way till the end. I hope
you've been inspired and you go out and get one of these units. TC Helicon also makes some other stuff
too, but you can also find ones from all ranges of producers. I mean look, it's up to you how you want
to sound on stage. If you want to leave things up to chance or take matters into your own hand get a
unit, do some pre-production, and you know what? It's not only gonna make you sound better, it's fun! It's
fun to produce your vocals. Okay so pick one up, see you on stage soon. Future Live
Musicians, let's go. From studio to stage!
