Digitech Vocalist Live Pro Processor User Reviews at zZounds

"Digitech Vocalist Live Pro-Studio Grade Quality at an affordable price!" submitted April 2, 2010

By a customer from juno.com

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Musical Background: Active Musician

Music Style: Classic Rock Show, One Man Band

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SPOTLIGHT REVIEW

Sound: The Vocalist Live Pro sounds great. There are so many ways to tweak the vocals in this unit that its pretty amazing, especially considering the low price for what you get. You can use it for doubling and then add different vocal enhancements to your voice, just the harmony part(s) or both. It has Lexicon licensed effects, a Sound Craft Preamp, so you're working with well known quality. I bought this for live gigs, and with the color display its easy to see the features that are set up on each vocal patch while on stage. I use my Motif ES8 workstation and send a Midi track to the Vocalist so it gets the correct chord information, it works perfectly. Stunning vocal quality, and very flexible. People, including other musicians have commented on how realistic it sounds. Tips-keep the pitch correction down to a minimum, especially if you don't have a great voice. If you're way off, ANY pitch correction in any harmonizer will correct your pitch and if you're way off, it won't be pretty. Don't over due the high frequencies on your mic or the harmonies, it sounds better when set to a faily flat EQ. Feature: I bought this unit to replace my Digitech Vocalist that I bought in 1992. I was pleasantly surprised with how many features this unit has. It can be set up to do up to 4 part harmony and you can select exactly what notes you want it to sing. Voice doubling is cool when you want more power and now harmony. You can combine digital delay along with a bit of reverb in parallel or series and you can save different settings to every individual user patch. There are 100 Presets and 100 User patches. The unit saves your patches when you turn it off and it has a USB port to connect to a PC to back it up. There is free software to not only back it up, but once on your PC, you can rearrange the order each vocal patch is in so you can step through them with a footswitch. One of the biggest improvements in this unit is it outputs an instrument level signal, unlike earlier models. So I'm sending a hot signal to my mixer and the unit is very quiet, even when I have the Vocals cracked up at gigs. Great for live or studio work. Ease of Use: This unit is fairly deep, but after reviewing the manual block diagram, I plugged the unit in and gave it a try. I started paging through the programs to see how they were set up and started to sing. I don't use MusicIQ for chord recognition, I use Midi so it tracks my vocals 100% accurately. I did play around with MusicIQ a few times and I'd say that anyone that uses it with a guitar should keep your playing straight forward and you will still get good results. I have to comment on the first review from 12/09. That gentleman said the unit was jumping all over the place and he was unable to get it to work. You have to provide simple chords on a KB and have a good mic signal so the Vocalist gets the information it needs to generate the correct harmonizes. I've heard a number of demos on youtube that sounded fine so this guy was doing something wrong. You have to work with these harmonizers awhile until you get the drift on how to best operate them. Its not plug and play. Quality: The Vocalist Live Pro build quality is excellent. I play weekend gigs and have been using it for over a year moving it around every time I play with no trouble. I keep it in a rack case and handle it myself so I suspect I will get years of service out of this like I got out of my original Vocalist. Value: Digitech is an excellent value for the money. Great sounding without paying over priced alternatives. Its not the cheapest you can find, but I don't want bottom of the barrel products either. Manufacturer Support: I only contacted Digitech once, it took a couple of days until someone got back to me but he answered my question prompty and knew what he was talking about. The Wow Factor: I don't care about cosmetics so much, I want a good sound, ease of use, and a reliable product. It does look cool though.I like the feel of the front panel controls, very solid and easy to page through menus when setting up a vocal patch to save. I couldn't do my act without it. Overall: I expect to have this unit a long, long time. It has so many features and even after a year of use, I haven't done a lot of things that it can do. I think Digitech has a leg up on competing products because its easier to use and not as expensive as some of the other brands. If it were lost or stolen I would buy another one and just load up the patches I saved to my PC and carry on. Although if I caught the dude that stole it he would be very sorry.

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"Awesome" submitted December 31, 2009

By a customer from justice.com

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Musical Background: Active musician

Music Style: played it all

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Sound: The sound is very good !! Ease of Use: If you read it will be easy to understand Value: I have had one for a year now and it is AWESOME. If you want to hear what it sounds like, do a search on youtube Manufacturer Support: Never called Support, always worked great !!

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Vocalist Live Pro Customer Review submitted December 4, 2009

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Sound: I'm not a great singer, and while this doesn't make you a better singer, it's a hell of a lot fun. Once you get the input adjustment correct, and hit the right pitch, it will produce incredible harmonies. I use it with my guitar, and it gets the chords in real-time. I love it, worth the money for me.

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"Does its job well, and does the jobs of many other pieces of equipment to boot" submitted January 12, 2010

By a customer from hotmail.com

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Musical Background: Hobbyist lover of music

Music Style: Ethereal Relaxation

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SPOTLIGHT REVIEW

VERIFIED BUYER

zZounds has verified that this customer bought this product from us.

Sound: Excellent harmonies, and the preamp and post-process effects sound great. Feature: 48v phantom power, preamp, compressor and vocal processor all in one Stereo XLR output is nice, and having inputs both at 1/4" and 3-pin XLR was a huge plus. Midi input lets you harmonize manually with any keyboard, or use a guitar input. Pedal input for stage use. S/PDIF output for your DAW Ease of Use: The menus can be daunting at first, but if you're good at recognizing patterns, you'll realize that there's method to the madness. They could have made it quite a bit easier right out of the box, but you get the hang of it after a few minutes or a couple of hours. Don't be put off by the initial setup. It starts making sense after you've played with it! Quality: The one I bought was b-stock, but it's in fantastic shape and performs very well. No physical flaws, performs exactly as I expected. Rack mounting is great. Very light weight, which is a good way to be--gravity hurts heavy equipment a lot more than light equipment. Just be sure to keep it in a sturdy rack mount! Value: If you're in a one-mic personal home studio, it's a must-have for the various types of equipment it can replace. This harmonizer has a very reasonable price compared to some other products. As a middle-of-the-road person myself when it comes to price, I like the sound of the Eventides, but the MSRP for those is more than three times this. Maybe in a couple of years when I have a little more disposable income, but the Vocalist Live Pro gets you similar results at less than a third of the price. Manufacturer Support: Excellent documentation, easy firmware upgrade downloaded from Digitech's site. Haven't had to deal with phone techs, and if it doesn't break, I won't need to either. The Wow Factor: It's pretty plain in looks, but it's an excellent addition to your rack. It's very customizable and loaded with features, and it will definitely be the most interesting and purely fun piece of sound equipment in your collection. The sheer enjoyment I've gotten from the excellent sound it produces (and the creepy voices you can do in video games, mass chats like Ventrilo and Mumble, and phone programs like Skype) Overall: It will be a few years before I'm ready to pick up an Eventide or other high dollar harmonizer. This accomplishes every feature I wanted, and will even serve as a backup to several other pieces of equipment in a pinch. After doing a lot of research and weighing my options, this is where I settled. It's a goldilocks piece of equipment. Not to expensive that it drains your bank account, not so cheap that it gets you a good deal but doesn't get the job done.

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"If it only did what they say it can do......" submitted December 23, 2009

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VERIFIED BUYER

zZounds has verified that this customer bought this product from us.

Sound: The sound is what you might expect from an electronic pitch shifting piece of gear. The preamp section is decent. The problem is that the harmonies do not track correctly and the unit is so complex that even the techs on Digitechs support line don't seem to have a complete grasp of the workings. I could not get this thing to track vocals accurately. There was a lot of warbling, bent notes and overall bad sounding things going on. I bought this thing to streamline my demo recording process. After days working with the unit, I still had nothing remotely usable recorded. My music is pretty straightforward. I also did not have any expectations that this was going to sound like real humans. I just wanted a resonable approximation for my song demos. I'm not reinventing the wheel here, so the problem is not due to some kind of intricate arrangement that "MusIQ" can't figure out. I am probably going to have to send it back, which is disappointing. The concept is great, but the product did not deliver for me. Feature: I wish it worked the way Digitech claims it does. Ease of Use: Not intuitive at all. Complicated interface. I found it impossible to get any kind of vocal harmony that wasn't full of warped notes and warbling. Quality: It looks pretty. decent connectors. Seems solid. Value: It would be well worth the money if I could get it to work. Manufacturer Support: The phone techs tried as best they could to help me, but were mostly ineffective. If they were able to resolve any of the problems I was having, I would not be returning the unit. At one point, referring to the pitch correction function, one of the technicians actually said "You have to sing pretty close to perfect" for the pitch correction to work properly. HELLOOO! I'm a pretty good singer, but that comment was the last straw in my decision to return this piece of gear. The Wow Factor: It looks nice. The advertising claims are very appealing. It just doesn't work. Overall: I am not satisfied at all. I probably won't look for anything to replace it. I'll just go back to doing vocals the old fashioned way. With my own voice.

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Rating And Reviews: Vocalist Live Pro

"Digitech Vocalist Live Pro-Studio Grade Quality at an affordable price!" submitted April 2, 2010

"Awesome" submitted December 31, 2009

Vocalist Live Pro Customer Review submitted December 4, 2009

"Does its job well, and does the jobs of many other pieces of equipment to boot" submitted January 12, 2010

"If it only did what they say it can do......" submitted December 23, 2009

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