Sax player using a Digitech Live Vocalist 4?

[summit111]

My Brothers,

 

My sax player is using a Digitech Live Vocalist 4 trying to achieve harmony effects. Is it true harmony or just notes in a higher key? He's had comments that what he's doing is not true harmony.

 

Personally, I think pedals are for bicycles...

 

Thoughts?

[tim_7string]

Well, the way the Vocalist Live series works is that it detects the key of the song by the instrument you plug into it, which is usually a guitar (although I believe a keyboard would work too). After it detects the key by the chords strummed on the guitar, it will create an appropriate harmony for whatever the input is for the microphone (vocal, sax, violin, etc.). I'm not sure if a monophonic instrument like a saxophone would be able to achieve the same effect on its own in place of the guitar. If your guitarist were plugged into the Vocalist 4 and then the saxophone were picked up by the microphone, it probably would work well enough.

 

My experience is limited to the Vocalist Live 2, though, so perhaps the 4 has more advanced features where the saxophone can automatically get harmony lines on the fly without the guitar being plugged into it.

[Shaster]

I'm not familiar with that particular unit but I do know sax players that use harmonizers. I've never been a big fan of them but then again, I don't have to stand up on stage and sound like a horn section all by myself.

 

Some of the early more basic harmonizers only gave you parallel intervals, so perhaps he's not diatonically correct on some of his notes. In other words if he's set it to a major third and he's in the key of "C", and he's playing a blues with root, three, five on each chord, some notes would be out of both the C major scale, and the C mixolydian mode (G major for the flat seven) so it could sound odd or bad.

 

However maybe the newer units track differently, I would asssume it's how you set them up.