Topic: First day with VLRack and I'm having issues with harmonies. Help!
Ok, so I got my VLRack on Friday and was finally able to spend a lot of time with it yesterday in my studio. I hear great things about the Voicelive 2 for live use but I only plan on using the rack for the studio. I'm using it in outboard format only as I don't use a computer/DAW setup like most. My rig is a digital board and digital recorder so I am using the S/PDIF I/O to keep everything in the digital domain. I don't plan on tracking with the VLRack but rather to use it for vocal effects in the traditional effects loop mode as well as for pitch correction and for recording harmony tracks.
The first thing I did was test out the unit in effects loop mode. It worked well and has some interesting effect presets and has deep editing capabilities for all effects parameters. As a multi-effects box for mixing it will work well.
The next thing I did was set the unit up for pitch correction and recording harmonies. Using the VLRack as an outboard unit for a mixer/recorder rig means I have to send my recorded vocal track to the VLRack and then recorded the corrected vocal is recorded back onto another track. It worked well although I did hear some artifacts. I was using the default setting #50 but I will admit this was on a vocal that was fairly pitchy. It was just a cover song demo my cover band did really quickly for something to put on our site and I did the vocal in a couple takes and it wasn't a great performance pitch wise but I knew that made it a good test track. All in all it works and with a more on pitch vocal track and a lower setting I'm sure a pitch corrected vocal can be accomplished transparently.
Last but not at all least was my attempt at generating and recording harmonies. I made sure to send a guitar track out of an aux and into the VLRack's guitar in input (I checked the aux with headphones just to make sure the guitar signal was present). I then sent the recorded vocal to the VLRack via the S/PDIF input (it's the same routing used in the pitch correcting test) and then set up two new tracks to record the L/R digital signal (harmonies) being sent back to my mixer from the VLRack's S/PDIF out. I muted the lead vocal in the VLRack's setup parameter and then tested it out. I should note that I used the pitch corrected track for these harmonies and what I heard was...well...crap. The harmonies recorded to the two tracks just fine but they sounded terrible. I tried changing the humanize function settings and even turning it off. I tried turning off the guitar input. No matter what I did the harmonies sounded terrible. The harmonies were just tracking weirdly. I tried several different harmony presets and none of them tracked well or sounded usable. I've heard people say that in a studio setting the VL's harmonies won't really stand up to scrutiny if soloed but these can't even be used if they were buried in the mix. I'm a pretty solid singer and didn't plan on depending on this unit to do all my harmonies on my own recordings but I thought it might help me add some interesting textures to the recordings that would take me tons of tracks and takes if doing it myself. Unfortunately the harmonies are useless at the moment unless I can figure out what I'm doing wrong. Notice I didn't say that I think it's the VL's fault. I've read too many reviews and listened to too many demos to blame the Voicelive, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the issue is. I was excited about the newer units being able to use the guitar input to create realistic harmonies instead of entering song keys and scales but I'm obviously missing something here cause it just ain't working. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
With that said, the interface is very easy to navigate with out reading the manual which is good because the print is REALLY SMALL! Think most companies now expect people to just pull up the PDF on their computers which is exactly what I did.