Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'm not a sound guru or anything close to that, but have been playing music for many years now and have learned a thing or two along the way.
I play the guitars and do back vocals on a copy band. We are all some sort of "retired" musicians from the 80's, and are now playing again since 2005 while we have other careers during the day.
This means we don't have much time to deal with complex issues, and will like to use any available time playing and performing instead.
Our rehearsals are carried out in our own studio (similar to a recording Studio), were we have all type of equipments such as PA's, speakers, monitors, mixers, effects, mics, crossovers, floor monitors, basically everything that may be needed. In any given day you'll get pretty decent sound from such kind of equipment but you'll also find yourself spending most of your time trying to be a sound engineer instead of a musician (unless you can afford a specific and qualified person for that task).
Those who have played in these type of studios, will know that even considering there is a pretty decent live sound, the vocals are sometimes affected by echo or too much or too low reverberation, delay, among other things, depending on the mixer setup as well as other aspects such as room dimensions, acoustics, etc.
Any detail will have an influence on the final sound mix and the end result.
Before I purchased the Boss VE-20 processor, the quality of vour vocals was good, but there were ocassional problems like feedbacks or hiss, sometimes noise or wrong delay rate, reverb or too much signal decay during rehearsals. The problem magnitude depended on how much our singer moved across the room or due to mixer parameter changes in certain songs, patches, etc, and these issues affected our performance consistency.
With the Boss VE-20 we are very satisfied because it features pretty decent settings for different singing styles (Rock, Blues, R&B, etc) and some of the effects are just amazing. Despite having a lot of other equipment at our disposal we are now only using the Boss VE-20 effects for the vocals and leaving all other parameters on the mixer at "flat" (0) position, just amplifying the signal through the PA. All the previous issues are now gone.
The quality of the VE-20 preamp has proven to be very good for us (Well our singer is very talented wich obviously helps pretty much)but all the effects are excellent as well.
The unit is very "user friendly" and easy to customize your own settings. As any other Boss pedal it is very robust and intuitive to use.
Effects such as harmonizer and multiple voices are just smashing and sound very realistic. It is amazing how different factory presets will perfectly adapt to different venues or scenarios (ie, Hall, Large Room, Small Room, Arena, Cathedral, etc). At Boss they have really done their homework by having professional sound mix parameters on each preset with perfect balance, and you can even adjust those and save them in a customizable patch.
To be honest we did not tried any other option before this one, as there are similar products in the market today, and therfore cannot stablish a fair comparison, but this one was very useful right out of the box and we feel like it was really worth the price paid.
In our case it has really helped solve a lot of complicated back vocals (those difficult to perform while playing an instrument) as our main singer is now doing most of these back vocals herself. This has also improved our overall vocal sound and now we spend more time playing and less time solving mixing problems on the sound console.
I won't be surprised if in the future Boss develops a bigger version of the VE-20, with more features, just like they have done with many other effects.
But for the moment I will highly recommend this Boss VE-20 Vocal Processor to any amateur and semi-pro band that want's to improve the vocal sound quality, inestead of having a band member becoming a part-time sound technician.
We are a couple of months away from using this on a live performace but for what we've seen so far, are pretty sure we'll be a success.
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