TC-Helicon VoiceLive 3 Extreme

This pedal has so much potential, the vocal section is great. The room-sense feature is amazing. The looper is okay... but from the guitarist perspective, there are a some serious deal-breakers.

With all the connection possibilities provided on the back-panel interface, the looper playback can't be separated from live guitar (with effects).

After the guitar signal enters the pedal, it has to exit either via:
1) the "guitar through" or
2) the main output -- (XLR)
and/or
3) the guitar outputs (tele jack)

As expected, the guitar-through jack offers a clean signal. If you connect to your amp using this jack, no loops or effects will come through.

However, all recorded loops and guitar+effects will exit through the main outputs and/or the guitar outputs. If you do not connected anything to the guitar output, then everything (vocals, effects, loops and live playing) will exit through the main outputs. If you connect the guitar output, then guitar+effects and all loops will exit exclusively through these, while the vocals will exit via the main outputs. Loops cannot be separated from your live-guitar (with effects) output. This means your loops and backing tracks etc will play through your guitar amp and/or the PA system.

Any serious guitarist who has invested in a signature sound will want to use their amp exclusive for their guitar. The amp is, after all, part of their instrument. It's bad enough to share your guitar signal with the looper (and potentially live vocals), but if you use this pedal to record a clean loop and decide to turn on the amp distortion for a solo, the loop will then distort along with it.

(If you connect your amp to the guitar-through jack, then you can't use any of the built-in guitar effects. Even a two-channel amp will not help, unless you can separate the looper from the guitar+effects signal.)

Since your only option of not sending loops and vocals into your amp is to route the guitar signal through the guitar-through jack, this means that the built-in guitar effects will not help you save any space on your pedal board.

As for the guitar section, the compressor and reverb are great, the delay and chorus are basic, but the other effects leave a lot to be desired. The auto-wah is unpleasant. The amp simulations are far from realistic. There is far, far more to amp simulation than the fancy pre/post EQ system touted as the nut and bolts of it all. The one place where they could really have used such an advanced pre- and post-EQ is the overdrive, but no such option is provided. You get only one uncustomizable overdrive sound per preset over something that doesn't sound or behave anything like an amp. A rhythm sound usually needs entirely different tones from the solo, but this is not provided for.

If the deficient routing system isn't hardwired, hopefully, TC Helicon will see the light and create separate routing for loops vs live playing through a software update.

I've been gigging with this pedal for 6 months now, and learned every single feature in it. I'm giving it 2 stars ONLY BECAUSE it actually does work well as a backing track player. If you're thinking of using this with backing tracks, then you'll love it. Connect straight to the PA system, use in-ears, no need for a mixer or guitar amp. Probably in a restaurant, busking, or small pub where you're not fussed about guitar sound too much. For my solo work gigs, it's brilliant.

But for everything else (playing with a band, recording etc.) Its completely useless. Here's why:

-The amp simulators are terrible: Trust me, I don't ask for much, just a semi-clean amp tone that sounds halfway real. But there are none. These amp sims will take away all the joy of playing your nice guitar.

-Can't use your own amp: yes you can plug it in and bypass the amp simulators... but you have one type of drive to choose from. It's called...drive. That's it. So as bad as the amp sims are, you're much better off using them than plugging into your amp, because at least you have SOME variety there. And don't think about using pedals in the guitar chain before it either. Tc Helicon basically guarantee that it wont be able to recognise the chords for vocal harmonies if you do.

-Harmonies are unusable: I wont blame then for the harmonies sounding super fake - it's the nature of digital harmonies, but it has to be mentioned. However it's the note choices that will ruin it. The harmonizer will hit wrong notes that are completely out of scale ALL THE TIME. I wouldn't risk using it for a real show.

Presets are ALL unsusable: There's not single preset out of 400+ that is usable out of the box. They seem to all be designed to make you sound like a dragon or chipmunk or with 7 harmonies right in your face. Nothing that's a decent guitar tone and subtle harmony. So you'll have to make your own from the start. I eventually just deleted all of the presets.

I've mentioned my biggest issues but there are many more small ones that I wont get into (mini Jack monitor output instead of xlr, backing tracks freeze 90% of the time while storing onto the pedal, fake sounding reverb and fx, the list goes on)

If you're gonna use this for backing tracks in solo gigs, it be great. Otherwise this is an amateur pedal. Avoid it if you play any serious shows at all.

My unit arrived defective and got replaced with another unit with exactly the same problem. Which is probably a ground loop problem and it's affecting the guitar side, meaning every time you plug your guitar, the machine produces a loud noise/hum that makes it totally unusable.

Now this can't be just my bad luck and with a little research on the net I have realised this product has some manufacturing problem which has never been solved and there are loads of people complaining about it. I even contacted the TC Helicon but they weren't very reassuring.

So... in short:
VOCAL FX: Wonderful
GUITAR FX: Good effects, poor amp simulations
LOOPER: Haven't had time to try that
MANIFACTURING: from my experience, very poor
Also, I think the pedal is very well organised and makes your life easier in many ways.

I am sorry to let it go but if I'm going to spend so much money and rely on a unit for vocal effects, guitar effects, backing tracks so basically my entire live show, it has to be reliable. And this is not!