BOSS VE 20

December 2010 Guitarist 127
BOSS VE-20 & TC-HELICON VOICETONE HARMONY-G XT £219 & £205
RECORDING
The Harmony-G XT reacts solidly
to your guitar chords, with some
musically valid harmonies that
complement your singing and playing
The idea is that you play your
guitar to generate vocal
harmonies, although there’s
also manual selection of scale
and key for singers without an
instrument or horn players. You
can also use a guitar to
manually set a key by playing
a chord and holding both
footswitches down.
TC’s VoiceSupport software
is included and is designed for
backing up and restoring user
presets and installing any
updates to the pedal.
Sounds
Tweaking the Harmony-G XT’s
10 presets is pretty
straightforward and, once
you’ve programmed in the
combinations of harmonies,
doubling and effects that you
want, onstage use should be
easy enough. The right
footswitch turns the harmony
and doubling effect on and off
but keeps any effects that you
may have added to your voice
(holding it down engages
bypass and accesses the
onboard guitar tuner).
Quick level tweaking is
possible via the knobs. The
centre detent positions of both
the FX and harmony knobs
provide a balance that works
well, but it’s an instant fix if you
want slightly less harmony or
the reverb off completely. If you
have just two favourite settings,
you can switch between them
with the left footswitch and not
have to worry about touching
the pedal at all.
The effects sound classy with
the default sounds, but there’s
variety available if you want it,
with three options for each FX
type and four variations on the
doubling effect.
TC-Helicon is the branch of
the TC group that specialises in
vocal effects, so it comes as no surprise to find that the
harmonies sound really good
whether they’re being
generated from your guitar
chords or via a key that you’ve
selected. High and higher
centre around a third and a fifth
above your voice, while low and
lower centre around a fourth
and a sixth below and bass sings
the root of your guitar chord
even if you’re singing other
notes. Tracking is good and the
Harmony-G XT reacts solidly
to your guitar chords, with
some musically valid
harmonies that complement
both your singing and playing,
as long as you can coordinate
the two. The process is probably
not something you’d want to
undertake on-the-fly at a live
show, but with practice you get
the hang of it.
BOSS VE-20
The VE-20 takes the familiar
BOSS twin-pedal form as seen
in the RE-20 Space Echo and
the RC-20XL Loop Station. It’s
a very practical and easy to use
processor – you just plug in a
mic, dial up one of 30 presets
and start singing. That said,
there are a variety of editing
tools under the hood if you
want to get stuck in and create
your own sounds for storage in
the 50 user memory locations.
An additional feature is a
phrase looper with 38 seconds
(mono) of recording time.
Each of the preset and user
patches is created from a chain
of up to six effects (dynamics,
pitch correct, tone/SFX,
double/harmony, delay and
reverb), each with its own
editable parameters. Knobbage
is quite minimal on the VE-20,
with just a central knob to scroll
through and select the patches.
Reverb level is the only
parameter that can be accessed
The Harmony-G XT is built to TC’s usual rigourous standards
GIT336.rev_tc 127 11/8/10 1:00:57 PM