TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 Review

Summary:

• Pros: The TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 has three-track looping, and tons of vocal and guitar effects. It’s very well-designed for live use, has great sound and plenty of connectivity options, including MIDI.
• Cons: A bit of a learning curve. Reading the manual is a must! It’s relatively expensive and only worth it if you play a lot of gigs and need the vocal effects in particular.
• Overall: A fantastic looper and multi-effects unit. It’s not for everybody, but it does everything you could realistically need, and does it very well.

Check Prices:

• Amazon: TC Helicon VoiceLive 3

Full Review

There are lots of reasons to use a looper, but they’ve long been used by songwriters for obvious reasons. One little – or not so little – pedal can turn you, your voice and your guitar into a full-fledged band, and lets you go beyond basic chords and vocals to multi-layered compositions. For a while, guitarists were the main focus for looper pedals, but pedals like the JamMan Vocal XT from Digitech and the Ditto Mic from TC Electronic explicitly cater to vocalists, and the new TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 continues in this vein. Combining a multi-effects processor with a looper pedal, and supporting both guitar and vocals, it’s designed with songwriting in mind. But is it worth picking up?

Meet the VoiceLive 3

The VoiceLive 3 is a pedal clearly designed for live use. The bulk of the body is taken up by a selection of ten footswitches, evenly spaced apart and each surrounded by a ring of lights so you can see which are active at a glance. It’s 35 cm (13.8 inches) wide and 21.6 cm (8.5 inches) back to front, so definitely a sizable unit, but when you consider the selection of effects and features on the pedal it really doesn’t take up much space at all compared to the number of stompboxes you’d need.

The overall design of the VoiceLive 3 is really easy to get to grips with. The footswitches occupy the bottom, and the top has the control panel, with an LCD display screen in the middle, four adjustment dials below it, six buttons to the left, one button to the right and a large control knob beside it. When you’re playing, you can work solely with the footswitches provided you’ve set everything up using the fine controls on the upper level first.

Designed to Work in Layers

The pedal makes the most of the pedals using a “Layers” system, where a footswitch is used to switch between vocal, guitar and looper layers, which then changes the six effect footswitches on the right of the unit to vocal effects, guitar effects or looper controls, respectively. A single tap of the switch toggles between guitar and vocals, and holding it down switches to the looper.

The two left-most footswitches are designed for switching between presets, which use combinations of effects to produce an overall sound for your vocals or guitar, and the relevant effects footswitches illuminate so you can see which components are involved and toggle them on and off to suit your needs. There are over 250 factory presets (with the ability to store 500 on-board), and they’re arranged by genre so you don’t have to footswitch tap through hundreds of options to find what you’re looking for.

All the Connections You Need

The back panel of the pedal has all of the expected ins and outs and then some. As well as guitar and mic inputs, it comes with a 3.5 mm auxiliary input, two XLRs for monitor in and thru, stereo outputs for both mic and guitar – so you can have both stereo vocal and guitar outputs simultaneously – MIDI in and out jacks, ¼ inch jacks for a footswitch and an expression pedal, a spot for the 12 V power supply and some extras like USB ports and headphone jacks. In short, you can connect up pretty much any way you like – the quick start guide has all the info on how to set it up.

So What Can You Do With It?

The layout is crucial for how the VoiceLive will perform in practice, but the features give you an idea of what it can actually do. And boy is the VoiceLive loaded with features. We won’t be able to cover everything in this review, but suffice it to say that you can do everything you could need from a pedal and more.

Vocal Effects

The vocal effects include echoes and delays, choir, doubling, reverb, HardTune (pitch correction), synth, transducer, μmod (“micro mod” – which includes things like micro pitch shifting, flanger, chorus and rotor effects), harmony, vocal rhythmic effects and stutter. You can, of course, make fine changes to all of the effects within these blocks, from adjusting the speed of pitch-shifting to changing how “humanized” the harmony and doubling effects are.

Guitar Effects

The guitar effects follow exactly the same “Do pretty much everything” formula as the vocal effects. The VoiceLive 3 offers amp modeling, drive, reverb, compression, delays, wah wahs, μmod, octave shifting, rhythmic effects and pitch shifters. Again, the broad types can be fine-tuned to suit your tastes. In short, they offer you everything you could realistically need to shape your sound to suit your preferences, regardless of the type of music you’re looking to play.

Looping with the VoiceLive 3

The fact that we’re only just getting to the looper tells you just how feature-packed the VoiceLive 3 is. Pressing and holding the layer footswitch takes you into looping mode. The system lets you choose whether you want to go right to overdubbing after recording your first loop or whether you want it to play back first so you press the switch again to overdub. Giving a choice here is a big help, as some pedals can railroad you into one or the other, but most players have a preference.

The looper lets you record multiple tracks, with up to two playing simultaneously but the ability to swap in a third one as well. So you hit the harmony/drive switch to start recording loop A, and then hit it again to switch to overdub or playback, but you also have the option to start recording on track B instead by tapping the reverb switch. The two loops can be different lengths, but if the second doesn’t fit neatly, the VoiceLive 3 just adds silence so they fill the same space.

Using the “swap” switch brings loop C into the mix. While three-track looping (such as on the Boss RC-300 or the five tracks on the RC-505) would be ideal, this fits well with the songwriting focus of the pedal. You can have a verse and chorus in the A and B spots, for example, and then switch into C for a middle section or an interlude to bring in and out as needed. You can also remove or bring back your most recent overdub by tapping the looper switch again, which helps with composition as well as being a lifesaver if you mess up as often as I do!

Plenty of Memory

With the most recent firmware update, there are 50 loop slots for you to store your creations, and each one contains three tracks of up to 8 minutes in length. It’s hard to imagine you really filling this, but you can import and export loops via USB if you need more space anyway.

Additional Features

There is so much more that could go in this section, but a couple of things are worth pointing out. Firstly, you can combine guitar and vocal effects in the same preset, so when you load it back up you’re completely ready to go with both effects layers, but you can also associate a loop slot with each preset. So if you’re performing a loop-based song, you could put everything in one preset, including three tracks worth of loops, your guitar sounds and your vocal sounds, ready to go as soon as you call it up. Add in another key feature, “Steps,” and this gets even more exciting. You can break down the effects portion of a preset into steps, so you can one verse setup, one chorus setup, one for the second verse and so on, which you can simply cycle through using the “step” switch as you progress through the song. It’s like having presets within a preset.

Is the VoiceLive 3 Worth the Money?

Overall, the VoiceLive 3 has a huge selection of features, including excellent and customizable effects, a very capable looper and a gig-friendly layout. The price-tag is a bit of a sticking-point, but it really comes down to what you’re looking for from a looper. You can get the Boss RC-300 cheaper, for instance, but if vocal effects are important to you, the huge selection on the VoiceLive 3 blows the handful on Boss’s unit out of the water. Even the vocal-focused RC-505 isn’t as good when it comes to vocal effects.

And this really sums up the decision with the VoiceLive 3. You could, of course, find a pedal that fills the same basic role for less money. But chances are, the VoiceLive 3 will wipe the floor with it on a completely different dimension. For example, the JamMan Delay also has a gig-focused design and a better delay effect, but it offers much fewer effects, nothing for vocalists and doesn’t allow multi-track looping. It’s still great, but if money isn’t a huge factor, the VoiceLive 3 does everything it can and much more.

The pedal’s complexity and do-everything mentality means that you’ll need to spend a bit of time with the manual to get the most out of it, and it’s definitely not something you’ll need if you’re more of a casual looper. However, if you play live, need great vocal effects in particular and you’re serious about looping, it’s one of the best pedals out there.

Where to Buy to VoiceLive 3?

• Amazon: TC Helicon VoiceLive 3

VoiceLive 3 Product Video