Hi folks. Haven't been around to much since moving to Chicago. I just got my wk8 back from the shop where it had a new vocal harmonizer board installed. It no longer has the "chirping" sound in the output but there is a noticeable hiss when the harmonizer is activated. It is only present when you sing though. It's almost like they built a noise gate into it to help cover up the hiss. I did a search on harmonizers here on the forum and it seems even the digitechs have some noise. I read Uncle Daves review of the voice prism and it seems to be the quietest of the lot. When playing live the noise is not much of an issue but when recording it's definitely noticeable. I can reduce the noise considerably by using the eq on the mic/line input to do a -12 dB cut at 6.4 Hz but you loose a lot of "air" in your vocals that way. I have three different mics, a dynamic and 2 condenser mics and the noise is present with all of them. A digitech vocalist would probably be quieter. A voice prism would probably make me very happy but very broke. Maybe a parametric eq with a deep single cut up around 10 kHz would help. Any ideas or thoughts on harmonizer noise would be appreciated.

Vic,
The Digitech is noisier than the Voice Prism, but better than the internal unit on the psr2k. I can't refer to the Gem, because I never heard the harmonizer you have. The TC is reeeeeeealy quiet. If you do studio work - this is the one you want.

Thanks for the info Uncle Dave. I'm probably guilty of expecting to much fronm a built in harmonizer. It's hard to explain the noise I'm referring to. It sounds like the white noise you hear when you crank the gain up on a cheap amp. Not real loud but just loud enough to be noticable on a vocal track during a quieter passage. I can remove the noise from the recorded vocal track using the noise reduction plugin in soudge forge but who wants to do that on a routine basis !! Oh well, a voice prism is way out of reach for the forseable future so....

[This message has been edited by Vic01 (edited 02-24-2002).]

Hi Vic01,
How do you like your WK8 is it the SE and you had to have the vocalizer replaced or do you just add it? Anyway I would like to know if the construction is Pro qualtiy I know it doesn`t have "hammer-action" keys but for me that would be a plus. I started out playing Hammond`s so I just can`t get used to weighted keys.
anyway , good luck!!!!
jedi

Hi jedi. I have the wk8 megastation not the se. They added the scsi interface, a sample from the pro2 piano and some other things to the se. I had the harmonizer replaced under warranty due to a chirping noise it was making along with the harmonies. The effect might have worked for some but it wasn't going anywhere for me. As far as the construction goes, it has a very solid feel. It has a whole bunch of screws holding it together. The keys feel almost semiweighted. Not reel spongy like some synths can be. It has after touch which I use on occasion with sax samples. The sequencer in it rocks. 250,000 note capacity down to event level editing it's a midi enthusiast dream machine. I used to do all my sequencing in cakewalk pro audio 9 and now much of what I do can be done through the wk8's sequencer. All in all I like the board a lot and you can always load in new sounds via it's sample playback capabilities. It will hold up to 40 megs of ram and playback akai, wave, aiff, and kurzweil samples. The onboard harmonizer is a little noisy for my tastes but usable for live work. Maybe someone has a deal on a digitech access or digitech vr. hmmm....

Vic,
I traded a Vocalist Access to Sam Ash in Cherry Hill NJ.
Go to www.SamAsh.com
and see if they still have it. Should be about $200US, I imagine.

[This message has been edited by Uncle Dave (edited 02-24-2002).]

Hi Vic,
Thank you for the info about the WK8 aside from what you mention about the keyboard, and this may sound strange, does it have hard plastic or rubber buttons for voice and style selection and do the drawbars have a smooth feel to them? Thanks for your help, it just that there is no place in my area that sells them and all I have to go by is a booklet that General Music sent me. Thank`s
jedi