Hi,
I'm Dennis and I run Karaoke shows in Minnesota. I work in the Twin Cities, but also have an ongoing show in Northern MN. It makes my week sort of tight in that I have a full time job as an Engineer. I run a show in the Twin Cities on Thurs and up north on Sat. I also do private parties and weddings.
I have a sound system for each venue, athough I take my computer with me. My traveling system is pretty compact, so I can move it around myself pretty quickly.
Last year I upgraded my system to include a TC Helicon Voice One vocal processor. I wanted to get one ever since I saw a demo a few years ago. This is a studio piece. TC Helicon makes these systems for recording studios. It has a very realistic vocal processor that can ad some very cool effects, like growl, breath, resonance, pitch, and a couple of others. Each effect has like 99 presets and then an infinate control knob, so you can get millions of different sound qualities. It is very complicated to run during a show. I have set up a number of presets, that I use and add to people singing with there permission. I have a Pop setting, a Cocker setting, a Deano and Elvis setting and so on.
The machine has two pentium processors that will modify the voice, process it and send it back in less than a milisecond. If you add a lot of effects it will delay a tiny bit longer. In most cases you can't tell the time diferrence. On the extreme, I can make a woman sound like Barry White, or a guy sound like Celine Dion. The sound is very natural and not synthesized at all.
It will also do a harmony line using your own voice that sounds very natural. You have to tell it octive and starting key, which makes it a bit difficult to do under the gun while running a show. I usually set it up ahead of time.
It also has a pitch/key, that will bring a singer that is singing off key into the right key...as long as they keep sing off key.
Well, as you can see, I'm a bit of a techie. Instead of talking about me, I talked about my stuff...oh, my wife will kill me...
