I bought a new toy off ebay (yes, a last-second bid beat the previous high bidder by just $2.50), which arrived on Saturday. It's a Digitech Vocalist VR, a rack-mount harmonizer that does up to five harmony voices simultaneously, in real-time. I played with it a little and got some interesting stuff out of it.
My intention is to use this while playing backing parts to simulate a horn section, and for that I think it will work pretty well. I still have some reservations about it, most notably that it fails to lock up occasionally (listen to the samples), and the latency that's obvious in some places.
I'm still working with it to determine the best place in my pre/fx/amp chain, but right now am leaning toward putting it right up front, using it as a balanced low-z input. It seems that any signal processing preceeding the harmonizer -- even just the tube preamp -- makes it a little more challenging to latch the source note. It's also very important to this unit to hear only one note, so precise playing is at a premium. Obviously this unit isn't for everything, but I recorded a couple of samples of my first experiments:
http://www.workingmansharps.com/Sounds/other/vocalizer_01.mp3
http://www.workingmansharps.com/Sounds/other/Somewhere.mp3
-tim
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