TC-Helicon VoiceTone H1

These pedals do what they say but unless you’re playing a guitar for the pedal to identify your key do not expect to just leave them on the floor and be able to press the switch on and off because they do need a key change in between every song so it kind of defeats the purpose having to keep going back to it with your hands. You can set the pedal on its chromatic setting to identify every note but then you won’t get the hard tune effect.

The pedal also has a gain dial on the side which is hand if you’ve got really gain hungry mics but turn the gain on the pedal up even halfway and your mic has waaaay too much gain. Much more than your mixing console would provide which is completely un-necessary and if you set the gain too low on the pedal you get weird distortion, noise and loss of quality.

I have owned a few TC-Helicon Harmony-G units in the past and thought I would try the H1. Its really simple to hook up and use and has acceptable harmony tones. You do have to choose your harmonies before you perform a song and cannot change them on the fly (as you can with the Harmony-G). The harmonies tend to waver at times or are perhaps too sensitive but I cannot tell yet if this is due to guitar chord sensing or ambient noise at gigs. What I do know is that the Harmony-G unit did not have this problem, but then it was a more expensive unit. To sum up, I would not buy this unit as my main vocal harmonizer, and only use mine as a back up to my Harmony-G.