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DigiTech Vocalist Live 4 Harmonizer: Rare Product Review

11:05 am by Ryan in Musician Gear

I rarely write about specific products, but I’ve just been blown away by the DigiTech Vocalist Live 4 Harmonizer.  I was treated to a demo (it’s best to set an appointment for a slow period during the day) by the friendly folks at the North Dallas Guitar Center, 4519 LBJ Freeway, in Farmers Branch, Texas–a suburb of Dallas.  They set me up with the system in their PA room and let me have at it.  The results were stunning.

First of all, what is this thing anyway?  The DigiTech Vocalist Live 4 Harmonizer is a device that actually creates harmonies–up to four parts–to back your real-time vocal while you’re singing the lead or one of the parts.  I’m not talking oohs and ahhs here, I mean it recreates the exact words that you’re singing.  It uses your guitar to determine what key you’re in, so it usually follows key changes nicely.  It is designed for live situations, but probably is a shade too synthesized for the studio.  I don’t think your live audience will be able to tell, however.

The basic set up is a real piece of cake.  Just plug in your microphone and guitar, and take two leads out (one guitar, one voice) for your board or snake. Adjust the volumes of guitar, lead voice and background voices on the front panel, and you’re ready to start playing.  I’m sure you can make it more complicated if you want to start tweaking, but getting you up and running is really easy.

The unit has about 100 presets that I could find.  You roll through them by tapping the up or down buttons with your foot.  In short, easy to understand descriptive names, you can usually tell what the effect is going to be.  For instance, the ”CSN” setting puts Crosby, Stills and Nash-style harmonies on what ever you’re singing. If you place it on the “7 bridges” setting and sing Seven Bridges Road by the Eagles, it totally nails the harmonies–but this is the only setting I see that references a specific song.

For the hour that I worked with the unit, I threw everything at it that I could think of.  America, Eagles, CSN&Y, originals, Styx (nailed that a capella part in the beginning of Renegade), etc.  The first time I opened my mouth and started singing, I couldn’t help but laughing out loud in my amazement.  The feeling never left as I ran down a list of old favorites. 

For my solo playing, this is an obvious boost in sound and enjoyment for me and my audience.  I got to thinking of other situations, too.  One of my biggest challenges of putting together bands for pickup gigs, is that the harmonies usually take a lot of time to work out, especially on the originals.  It’s also a lot easier to find musicians who can play, but can’t sing.  This would be a great stop gap measure to get the band up to a full vocal sound, even if only the lead singer were ready.  I could also use it to work vocalists in, turning off the harmonizer once everyone felt confident to sing their parts.

This will be my next major equipment purchase.  Now I just need to convince my wife that we need to buy it before we get a new refrigerator!

2 Comments

1. My review for the DigiTech Vocalist Live 4 Harmony Processor :

   Don’t Flaunt It If You Don’t Have It!

   I for one am pretty damn tired of stringing us along for months upon months–they should’ve gotten all the major bugs out LONG before they started promoting it. Makes me wary of the product because of the constant push backs. If they’re having this much trouble getting it into production you better wait a year after it comes out before you buy one–I’m guessing it’ll be a bugs-galore cluster-F! I mean I hope not but this is ridiculous!

   Comment by Richard — May 5, 2008 @ 8:01 am

2. I am thinking about getting one of these. Does anyone know what the processor does if 2 or more microphones are input through a mixer instead of just a solo mic? I would assume that as long as only one person sang at a time the unit would produce the harmony according to what is preset. But what if two or more voices sang at the same time. Does the unit try to harmonize each voice? Does it get confused and shut down?

   Comment by Bob — July 23, 2008 @ 8:22 pm

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