MY TC Helicon Voicetone Harmony M finally arrived at the local GC yesterday and I picked it up. Upon arriving home, I opened the box, pulled out the unit, then pick the operating manual out of the box. Unfortunately, the operating manual was for the Voicetone Harmony G, which is just about worthless when it comes to learning how to perform the proper setups.
The first thing I did was contact GC and told the sales person what happened. He said he would get me the right manual, but it would take a few days. It wasn't his fault, obviously, it was TC Helicon's quality control, or lack thereof.
There is no telephone number for TC Helicon in the instruction manual, and for any kind of service you must go through their website, which was down. I called GC again and they provided me with a telephone number, which tortures you with a number of button pushes to get to the technical service area. Of course when you do finally get to the technical service area the first thing that happens is you get put on hold for at least 20 minutes while listening to a stupid message that keeps telling you to go their website.
Finally, after 20 minutes of listening to that dumb-assed message, a young man gets on the phone and asks the nature of my problem. I explained to him that I recived the wrong manual and could he tell me how to set up the midi channel over the telephone. As it turned out, he knew less about the Harmony M than I did and I only had the thing for a couple hours at this point. Then he told me to download the manual from the website. When I told him the site was down he replied, "Oh, someone told me that but I think it's back up now." NOT A PRAYER! Then he said he would email me the manual, which they have not done.
Later that night, I was able to post my problem on their email customer service area, but thus far, still no response--18 hours later.
Fortunately, DonM was able to email me the manual, which is relatively short and easy to work with. It only took 2 minutes to determine which buttons to push in order to set up the midi connection.
The unit sounds great. It's easy to work with, the vocal harmonies are crisp, clear and full. As for vocal quality, it is superior to my Digitech VRs, particularly when it comes to realism and clarity.
The bottom line: It's a keeper. It's very compact, and I think I've already figured a neat way to incorporate it within my console so everything can remained plugged in, thereby not adding any additional gear to the console and still keep overall setup time down to 10 minutes.
The only drawback is TC Helicon's customer service division. Hopefully, I will not need to use them anytime soon.
Cheers,
Gary
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Travlin' Easy