TC-Helicon VOICETONE X1 Single-Button Stompbox for Dramatic Megaphone and Distortion Vocal Effects

I managed to find this used on Amazon for a pretty big discount but I was actually looking for a new one before I came across that. It looked like the person before me tried it for five minutes, hated it, and sent it back. I hated it for the first five minutes too. Feedback. Gates cutting out. Much more noise than I wanted. And so I persevered and tried all the settings. Hey… two of these are exactly what I was looking for. One might be handy in the future. The rest don’t work for me. So 1/3 of the sounds I find usable. This is ok I’m good with this. Further two of them just aren’t ok they really fit the bill. I’m doing a one man show and I’m a baritone but sometimes I don’t want to sound like Johnny Cash. So.. here we are. It’s lovely. Experiment with this thing and you’ll probably find your sounds too if a distorted and cutting sound is what you’re after. It took a lot of taming to balance the levels out without feedback. Be careful but have fun.

it's really cool but it's hard to control the feedback it produces, does anybody have some advice? besides having an extra mic for the pedal and making sure that the amps are not near the mic?

I saw many reviews complaining about feedback issues, and I just assumed this was only for the distortion effect, when I only planned on using the megaphone effect on this pedal. So I bought it and- the feedback is really bad on all settings, even with the megaphone effect. On top of that, there’s a bit of input delay when this pedal is on, there’s just this small delay between when you start singing and when sound actually comes out of this pedal, so the first second of everything you sing gets cut off, only when the pedal is on.Genuinely unusable in a live setting. In a recording setting I had some fun with it, but nothing you can’t just do in your DAW, and also the weird delay problem got very annoying

I was jazzed to find a reasonably-priced vocal-specific distortion pedal that I could use in a live setting. Alas, this thing did NOT do the trick. I followed the instructions and plugged my SM58 into the box, turned up the mic gain (on the stompbox) until the LED displayed green/orange, and then turned up my PA system to hear the results. HELLO FEEDBACK. If I turned up the PA's volume to a level that was loud enough for rehearsal, it fed back like a mofo; if I tweaked the output volume to eliminate feedback, the signal was nowhere near loud enough. Turning down the input mic gain on the pedal resulted in my vocals coming in-and-out; only the loudest vocals would reach the gate threshold and actually produce an audible signal. And all this was done with no other instruments in the room - when I did finally try to play some clean elec guitar as I sang, the feedback of course worsened.And you can forget about getting the distorted vocal level to match at ALL with the clean signal - it was impossible! If I had showed up to a gig with this thing, the sound guy would have punched me in the balls.For studio work, you might get some decent results (where room volume is not important), but for a live setting...it fails miserably.

Most of the complaints have to do with feedback. The company has added a feedback gate that closes the mic when not in use. Seems to work great.Update 4/6,The adapter that came with the unit no longer supplies enough power for it. At first I thought the whole thing had fried out, until I plugged in a 18v adapter (twice what it came with) and it began working again. Not sure why this happened, but it has been working fine ever since.

Cool idea and I love the sound of distortion on vocals, but this product is really tough to dial in a decent vocal sound and I have tinkered for hours.

I'm not sure when it was added but at some point they added an adjustable gate to this pedal to control feedback. It is adjustable by holding down the stomp button and turning the filter knob. Most of the bad reviews are either from before this was added or from people that don't know how to adjust it. Out of the box, the gate was cutting parts of my voice so I lowered it since I mainly play in a low feedback environment. If you have feedback, do the opposite. I love the different voices of this pedal, was exactly what i've been looking for.

Once you figure out how to use the built in noise gate...it's not bad. The documentation and interface is garbage. So far, for live vocals with a little dirt on them... it seems to work and the sound person doesn't hate as they did with previous solutions :) But, if they gate was easier to set up, was more intuitive and had more options...this would be killer.