Musikmesse: TC-Helicon today announced VoiceTone Synth, described as radical vocal processing in a pedal.

VoiceTone Synth brings together a collection of extreme exotic and contemporary sonic effects, including jagged HardTune effects (Auto-Tune), classic Vocoder effects, a voice-controlled synthesizer and vocal distortion and megaphone effects.

VoiceTone Synth Features:

• HardTune effect with user-selectable key or instrument-sensing
• Vocoder carrier can be driven by internal voice-controlled synth or instrument input (such as guitar)
• Transducer effects, such as megaphones, distortion and radio voices
• All effects can run simultaneously
• Includes Tone feature for adaptive live engineer sound processing
• Presets that can be edited and stored
• Instrument Thru allows normal instrument amplification and vocoding

Details below.

If you’ve used the TC-Helicon VoiceTone Synth, leave a comment with your thoughts!

HardTune

The jagged, stair-stepped vocal sound of key-based hard tuning is everywhere in contemporary R&B, Hip Hop and Electronica. This feature has eluded the majority of performing musicians until VoiceTone Synth came along. Now musicians can produce this effect live by simply recalling a preset and hitting the ‘On’ button. Easy key input methods include auto-instrument sensing or pushbuttons with a clear display of the current key. Other features of the HardTune effect include dry voice mixing, octave shift and character modification.

Vocoder

The vocoder in VoiceTone Synth is called ‘Massive-Band’ for a reason. It effectively scales resolution from ultra-clearly-enunciated Robot voices to the sound of the classic, analog low-band-count vocoders we all know and love. The benefit is that, while typical vocoders require a lot of pre-processing like distortion and EQ to hear the effect properly, with the VoiceTone Synth vocoder effect you can input signals such as clean acoustic guitar and vocode perfectly for sounds that until now have been impossible to achieve.

Voice-controlled Synth

The Vocoder also features a voice-controlled synth mode – considered by many as the Holy Grail for vocoding. Prior to VoiceTone Synth, vocoding required your voice (the exciter), and an instrument input (the carrier) to make cool vocoded sounds. Of course VoiceTone Synth supports the dual input method, but for artists who don’t have another instrument or don’t play one, VoiceTone Synth can generate a synth part directly from your vocal and vocode that. The result? Generated vocoder parts with one input: your voice.