Hi Steve,
Nice to see your answer ! I have to try out more stuff regarding the harmony and the arrangement of generated voices...
I have the VoiceLive since friday and spent almost all the week end trying stuff at home. I still didn't try the VoiceLive with the whole band on stage yet...But I ll try to post tomorrow a post about how I did while rehearsing.
Regarding the sound on stage, I may say it could be quite difficult to have a good sound. So, in my opinion, first thing is to be sure you'll have a great "dry" sound for your sax. Quite often in little gigs there is no sound engineer...And when we do have one, saxes is definitely not the easiest instrument to deal with...So....Bad sound and/or sax not audible at all...
Sax sound spread from different places of the instrument according to the notes your are playing (bass, medium, treble)...It could be tricky to have a good dry sound.
When dealing with effects, splitting dry and wet sax sound on two different channels is, according to me, very important so you can really achieve a better sound quality, cause you got control over the two different signals in terms of Gain, EQ and Dynamic..etc..etc...but you need someone on the front to check.
My microphone gives very good results (ATM 350 From Audio-Technica)...I used to have a Shure SM58 but didn't like the sound....And if you move out from the mic directional cone, then you lose a lot of dynamic. So no worries with clip-on mics...they might be more expensive than the Shure SM 57/58 but really I think it's a "must have". This is my opinion, many saxes use SM57 / 58 and are happy with them...
Talking about harmony, I ve just played around with the presets...trying to understand how scale/chords/notes/shift mode work...Here is I think the most complicated stuff...
I ve tried the midi mode using a sequencer...(Logic Midi out on midi channel 1 --> In Voice Live midi channel 1).
A basic II/V7/I sequence, one bar II, one bar V, 2 bars I...but as soon as you have more complex sequences, it was messing around...but once again, I didn't pushed the experience further and I m new in this harmonizer so...I might did something wrong for sure.
I m gonna try tonight with the keyboard player and see how the VoiceLive interpret MIDI signals to generate the harmony voices. So for now I can't tell you more on this.
I ve had a lot of fun using the Arnold preset too
Regarding the Major/Minor thirds issue, I guess the best way would be to work in song mode as you can switch presets "on the fly"...Did not try it yet...but i guess playing live it could be quite stressy to do it that way....That's why I wanna try out the midi mode with the keyboard player...
I ve noticed that in some cases, upper harmony voices doesn't sound too bad at all...nor "kazooey" as I could have read somewhere. But I can't say why...Harmony is not my best musical skill actually...
I m gonna try to do some simple presets with 2/3 voices, trying to match as much as I can the reggae horn section arrangements :
Lead sax
Voice 1 --> Unison (or Thickness FX) or Octave Up (and also octave down)
Voice 2 --> 1 Octave and a fifth up the lead (or down).
Well...I still have a lot of work to do on this harmonizer...but it's a lot of fun...And for backing vocals...it's really good.
Cheers
Thomas