The VoiceLive 2 from TC Helicon is a pretty badass little box of toys.  I bought it to try and create some harmony parts when I’m the only saxophone player on a gig, but I’m starting to explore some of its other uses now too.

The box is designed for singers, but I’ve noticed a few other intrepid souls using it for horns — some sax, trumpet, and trombone players from what I’ve seen.  I thought it would be useful to share some of my settings for our non-standard use.

First, the tone controls are super useful but since they are expecting a singer’s voice they need some tweaks for a horn.  Since I often play in situations where there is plenty of noise from the drums and bass, I wanted to really focus the frequencies of my horns and cut out the rest so I set some custom settings for the EQ, compressor and gate.  I find that this greatly improves the accuracy of the harmonies that I’m trying to create.  My EQ settings:

• adaptive: off
• low gain: -12dB
• low freq: 103.7
• high gain: -8db
• high freq: 1107.9
• para gain: 3db
• para freq: 261.4
• para width: 1.3

These low and high settings will cut out the sounds of my horns (tenor and soprano, generally) outside the normal range of the instrument.  The parametric settings are centered to be roughly in the middle of my tenor with a 1.3 octave width.  If I bump the parametric gain above +3db I encounter some distortion with some of the harmonies, but this may vary depending on a person’s mic setup and how much the input gain is already configured for.  To figure out where you should set the high, low and para frequencies for your particular instrument, refer to something like this: http://www.contrabass.com/pages/frequency.html.

As for the harmonies, I voice everything so that my horn is on the top-most note of the chord.  I hold the theory that having the real instrument on top makes the whole chord sound more legitimate.  For my purposes, I often run one harmony voice a 6th below.  It’s a good ‘go-to’ setting to get a quick litte section sound going, but I almost always end up creating custom scales when I really arrange a tune.  In addition, I:

• add the same eq settings to the harmony voices
• turn the voicing all the way ‘male’
• keep choir, humanize, and vibrato off (generally)
• keep porta and smooth low (something like 5/30%);
• hold release to 200-300ms (although I’m not convinced about this one…)

For reverb, I generally try to be subtle.  I’ve usually take the jazz reverb setting and reduce the time on it significantly.  My hope is that it just beefs up the sound rather than imposing a specific reverb scenario in a situation where it will seem out of place.

Here’s an export of my Setup Data:

• StackedSax_Setup_4_6_2012.syx

Hopefully this will encourage some discussion among others who are trying the VoiceLive 2 with horns.  Holla’ if you’re out there.

Some of the links I used to research:

• http://www.audiorecording.me/mixing-horns-trumpets-trombone-sax-eq-techniques-for-best-clarity.html
• http://jazzteddybears.com/compressors2
• http://www.propellerheads.se/substance/record-u/index.cfm?fuseaction=get_article&article=part2b
• http://www.contrabass.com/pages/frequency.html