Following on from their VoiceLive Play Acoustic pedal, TC Helicon address the needs of the singing electric guitarist with the VoiceLive Play Electric. The new pedal combines vocal effects such as pitch-correction and real-time harmonies with guitar processing straight out of the company's TonePrint pedal range and amp emulations from the flagship VoiceLive 3 (reviewed in SOS July 2014).
One of the most impressive features of the VoiceLive Play Electric is the automatic, real-time vocal harmonisation that tracks your guitar playing. In order to do this, the pedal requires a guitar input, but if you want to take your dry guitar signal back out to a pedal board, you can. If you wish to keep your gig rig light and portable, you can use the VoiceLive Play Electric's built-in guitar effects and amp modelling, and feed these signals straight into a PA.
Regarding guitar effects, the pedal incorporates over 20 including reverbs from the TC Electronic Hall Of Fame pedal, delays from the Flashback pedal, modulation from the Corona Chorus stompbox and many more, including compressors, panners, flangers and distortion/overdrive. When it comes to vocals effects, it's well-stocked, offering delays, doubling, T-Pain-style hardtuning and more.
There are only three footswitches on the VoiceLive Play Electric: Up, Down, and HIT. While the first two are used for scrolling through presets, HIT is performance-orientated feature that lets you turn on multiple effects at once and create A/B scenes for each preset. A powerful looper is also built into the pedal. Known as VLOOP, it lets you create guitar and vocal loops for layered performances, but it also comes in handy for those time when you're having to be performer and engineer: record a phrase and walk out into the audience to check your sound while the recording plays back.
If you want to capture your sound quickly into a laptop, USB recording is also possible via an integral USB port.
To hear more audio examples, go to the VoiceLive Play Electric website, below.
