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Boss VO-1 Vocoder Pedal

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Welcome to NAMM 2016. We're here at Roland and Boss. My name is Sarah Vee. This is the lovely Jordan West. She will be accompanying me on the cajon. 

Today, we are showcasing the VO-1 Vocoder by Boss. It is powered by the guitars and technology. It allows you to achieve those classic talk box sounds without the use of a hose, and also allows you to achieve 2 different kinds of vocoder effects. You have your vintage which is a throwback to your old school vocoders. Then, you have a more advanced setting which allows you to have a little more spaciousness and depth added to that vocoder effect. I'll go ahead and showcase the talk box here. 

[singing] … That was the sound box setting. Of course, if you'd like to add more distortion you can. There is a colour nob, and that adds your distortion as well as a tone nob which can the amount of brightness you'd like to add to that effect as well. I'll go ahead and showcase the vintage vocoder effect. All right, so here we have the vintage.

[singing]  … That was our vintage vocoder effect. Of course, same thing with the color nod you can add distortion and also add, determine how much masculinity or femininity you want to add to that tone. We'll go ahead and showcase the advanced setting. 

[singing]  …  That's our advance setting, and that is the VO-1 in a nutshell. 

TC Helicon Perform V Vocal Processor

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Hi, everybody, it's Tom Lang from TC Helicon. Shout out to my fellow Canucks out at Long & McQuade. We're talking about Perform V this year at 2016 NAMM.

This is a new product for TC Helicon that's designed to be the simplest vocal processor that you can  clip onto a mic stand. It's designed for people who just want the easy effects, the ones that you could just reach down and turn on to make your vocals sound great.  

Of course we've got the adaptive tone feature which rolls away mud, which controls dynamics, does de-essing, and we've anti-feedback, which is great, so you can crank it up with confidence. It's very fast-acting, works well. We've got pitch correction, it's a gentle chromatic pitch correction that subtly pushes you back into tune. Also doubling, reverb, and echo, the three main building blocks of a great vocal sound.  

So each one of these has their own style selection. There are four styles, and you can control the volume of them like this. Each one has its own colour and they have different flavours; for example, in double we have octave up, octave down, unison, doubling, and then a mix of all of those. Reverb, the same thing. We've got this fine, high-quality TC Helicon reverb. You got four styles; long, short, dark, bright, etc. Then you have echo, you've got quarter-note echoes, eighth-note echoes, slap echo. Of course with the tap button here you can always just reach down and synchronize the echoes to the time of your song. 

The talk button here basically removes all of the effects but keeps the tone on and boosts the level of your voice just a little bit so when you're talking to your audience you come out clear. There's three presets on it and those presets can store the combinations that you make over here of the doubling, echo, and reverb.  

Now, here's what gets really cool. When you use a smart phone or an iPad, say, you can download an app from us that's free and it allows you to choose from our 500 preset library to add extra effects to this. Say you wanted to add hard tune or megaphone or harmony or something like that, basically you just find the sound you want and then you can beam it; that is, you press a little button and it makes this modem-like sound that comes into the microphone here, and now you've added, for free, a new effect that wasn't in the product before. So that's really, really exciting. Free and lots of fun.  

Here we have the microphone in, this is an XLR mic in; we have the main output here, this is where you get the effects and the mix of your vocal as well, XLR out. This is the pedal input for our Switch-3 or Switch-6 pedals that allow you to control the product hands-free. Then we have the aux in from your music player so you can sing along, sing along with your favourite tunes. USB for recording to your laptop, and power that's included with the unit. There we go.

Some other features are an onboard microphone. It's a multi- function microphone,  in the one case it allows you to, like I said, beam in the new sounds, but also when you're practicing and you don't want to take the time and hassle of rigging up a mic stand and a mic and a mic cable, you can just sing through this and this would be your main mic and you can hear all the effects in your headphones.  

The mic is also used, should you beam in a preset in there, the mic will pick up this musical sound in the room and make the harmony notes go to the right places. You can also connect a foot switch; we have two foot switches, we have the three-button Switch-3, we have the six-button Switch-6 so that if you're playing it and you don't actually want to control it right at that moment with your hands, you can control it with your feet. There's an eighth-inch connector for your music player so you can sing along with your favourite tunes, and it has a USB output so you can record to your laptop. 

So that's about it. That's Perform V here from NAMM 2016, it's great, and I'm Tom Lang from TC Helicon. Thanks a lot.