Play Acoustic combines all the things you need to make a live acoustic performance shine: lavish vocal sounds, perfect backing harmonies, best-selling guitar effects, and unique processing that makes your six-string sing – in perfect harmony with your voice.
Keep your vocals clean with a tight reverb or simple harmony – or go all out with tasty delays, thick doubling, edgy hardtuning, cool modulations, and raw distortions. The choice is yours with hundreds of presets from the most popular styles.
Play Acoustic treats your guitar with the respect it deserves. Tailor-made guitar FX from TC Electronic add a sweet touch of magic and our new BodyRez gives you a fuller, acoustic tone when you’re playing through a PA.
1. Access your effects directly, choose the presets you want and find the styles you like.
2. Easily browse hundreds of preset sounds.
3. Add dazzling effects for the chorus, or strip it down for the verse, you decide!
4. Dedicated inputs and outputs for your voice and guitar – plus inputs for headphones, auxiliary devices, an expansion pedal and USB for recording, updates and new presets.
“You can dial in a fantastic guitar sound, fill a room with amazing vocal effects and backing harmonies, and even loop musical phrases. This simple stomp box contains some serious technology in an easy-to-use platform.”
-Cult of Mac
"As a vocal enhancer this piece of kit is up there with the best. The sound is full and clean, and the harmonies realistic. The more you fiddle, the more you get from this packed piece of gear - take the option of looping as an example."
-Songwriting Magazine
"Without the effects on, it gave my guitar and voice nice, clean tones. Add to that the beautiful effects and the ease of use, and the total makes the TC Helicon Play Acoustic a fantastic addition to any singer/songwriter’s performance rig!"
-inSync Magazine
Play Acoustic is loaded with vocal effects from our best-selling VoiceLive® series: reverb, doubling, HardTune, µMod, tap delay and transducer. Get inspired with incredible, natural sounding harmonies guided automatically by your guitar. There’s also Adaptive Tone for an optimally produced sound every time you sing.
> 100s of presets from the most popular styles
> Adaptive Tone - your personal sound engineer
> Easier than ever to create and personalize your sound
> Practice favorite tracks with Vocal Cancel
> Even more control with our Mics and Footswitches
Likely the most popular and impressive of our effects suite, Harmony creates up to 8 voices of harmony (varies by product), based on your vocal input and surrounds you with professional sounding backup singers. Once you’ve added harmony to your performance, we think you’ll never want to sing without it.
For more information on harmony and musical theory, check out: Wikipedia Harmony
Our scale chart, showing harmony notes created from an input note, can be found here: TC-H Harmony Chart
Doubling creates an effect that makes your voice sound “larger” in the mix. It’s an extremely popular effect in a wide variety of musical styles from Pop to Hip-Hop and everything in between.
For more information on Doubling or “double tracking” see: Wikipedia Double Tracking
Also known as Echo, delay repeats the input sound in various ways, from single “taps” to multiple panned asynchronous repeats. Often, delay is mistaken for reverb in a song. It’s typical in a recording to use a small amount of both delay and reverb to create the desired spatial effect.
For more information on the technical aspects of reverb, see: Wikipedia Delay
Short for Reverberation, reverb simulates an acoustic space like a concert hall or a bathroom. Typically, slower songs use longer reverb and faster songs use shorter reverb.
For more information on the technical aspects of reverb, see: Wikipedia Reverberation
Some people know it as the Cher or T-Pain effect. We call it HardTune. It’s a very aggressive form of pitch correction that forces the voice to “jump” from one note to the next in an almost robotic way. The effect works the best when confined to a set scale, where the intervals between notes are more noticeable. To get the most out of the effect, you’ll need to adapt your singing style to help accentuate the way that your voice shifts from note to note. Try sliding between notes.
Any effect that provides overdrive, distortion or filter falls under Transducer effects. You’ll find effects like Megaphone, Radio, Amplifier Emulation and more here. Always take care when using transducer effects in a live situation. Due to the extreme gains and eq’s imparted on the signal, these effects are very prone to feedback.
For more information on Transducers see: Wikipedia Transducer and Distortion: Wikipedia Distortion
µMod, pronounced “micro mod” contains effects that chorus, flange or otherwise modulate the signal. These effects can range from subtle to extreme.
For more information on Chorus see: Wikipedia Chorus Effect and Wikipedia Flanging Effect
You have a tireless two-singer backing group which sounds more realistic than ever with improved portamento and humanization on our already renowned harmony effects. And don’t worry about setting the key: Play Acoustic follows your guitar chords automatically for harmonies that stay in tune and in time.
Equipped with our trademark Adaptive Tone, Play Acoustic acts as your personal sound engineer providing the one feature no singer should be without: automatic intelligent control of Compression, EQ, De-essing, and Gating, giving your voice impact and presence to always stand out in the mix.
Singing along is a great way to practice and perform. Plug in your MP3 player via the AUX In connector and use the Vocal Cancel feature to make your voice stand out over the vocals on the original track. You can also record and play back your singing using the USB connection to your computer and DAW.
> Legendary TC Electronic Guitar FX – Hall of Fame Reverb, Flashback Delay & Corona Chorus
> New: BodyRez restores acoustic tone to your amplified guitar
> Guitar feedback-proofing with notch filter and phase controls
> Separate vocal and guitar outputs, or a stereo mix of both
> Extend Your FX Control with the optional Switch-3 pedal
Play Acoustic comes preloaded with select FX to best suit your acoustic guitar – including TC Electronic's award-winning TonePrint pedals, Hall of Fame Reverb, Flashback Delay and Corona Chorus. The direct Guitar DI output ensures signal fidelity all the way from pedal to PA.
Short for Reverberation, reverb simulates an acoustic space like a concert hall or a bathroom. Typically, slower songs use longer reverb and faster songs use shorter reverb.
For more information on the technical aspects of reverb, see: Wikipedia Reverberation
Also known as Echo, delay repeats the input sound in various ways, from single “taps” to multiple panned asynchronous repeats. Often, delay is mistaken for reverb in a song. It’s typical in a recording to use a small amount of both delay and reverb to create the desired spatial effect.
For more information on the technical aspects of reverb, see: Wikipedia Delay
µMod, pronounced “micro mod” contains effects that chorus, flange or otherwise modulate the signal. These effects can range from subtle to extreme.
For more information on Chorus see:Wikipedia Chorus Effect and Flanging: Wikipedia Flanging Effect
Short for EQualization, these controls allow you to shape the sound of audio by increasing or decreasing the gain of various frequencies. For example, our Tone feature for vocals adds high frequency and reduces low frequency to add “crispness” and reduce “mud” in the signal, making vocals sound more like they would in a recording studio.
For more information on Equalization see: Wikipedia Equalization
Here’s a handy chart that shows which instruments and sounds occupy various frequency ranges: Independent Recording Network Interactive Frequency Chart
Short for Reverberation, reverb simulates an acoustic space like a concert hall or a bathroom. Typically, slower songs use longer reverb and faster songs use shorter reverb.
For more information on the technical aspects of reverb, see: Wikipedia Reverberation
The sound of resonating wood is what gives an acoustic guitar its particular sonic allure, and this is where BodyRez comes in. New and unique to Play Acoustic, the BodyRez algorithm restores acoustic tone to guitars fitted with undersaddle pickups.
Carefully placed filters and fast acting compression combine to reduce “piezo-quack”, making your amplified guitar sound like the beautiful full-bodied instrument it is. Dial in as much or as little BodyRez as you need and use the handy EQ controls to fine-tune the dynamics of your sound.
No acoustic guitar is the same – and neither are singer-songwriters. Tweak and edit the sonic style of the included guitar effects as much as you want until you find that perfect tone for your guitar. Then, just set it and forget it. Play Acoustic takes care of your sound from here on out.
HIT is a performance-inspired feature for building intensity into any vocal performance. Press the HIT button to turn on multiple effects at once and create quick A/B scenes for each preset. Use it to add dazzling vocal effects for the chorus, or strip it down for the verse – it’s your call.
When you choose an effect you’ll immediately see a unique image making it easier to quickly find the sound you’re looking for. We’ve also given you focused parameters for each of the main effects styles – you can set things like level, decay, drive, filter and more.
Navigating Play Acoustic is as straightforward as it gets. Use the Up/Down footswitches or central knob to easily browse factory presets, or use the GENRE button to find styles that you like. Dedicated VOCAL FX and GUITAR FX buttons let you access effects directly, and the intuitive user interface makes editing simple and fast. Create your own library of presets with the FAVORITE feature for easy setlist recall.
Separate outputs for vocals and guitar make it painless for any sound engineer to mix the levels perfectly for your audience, or you can create your own custom panoramic stereo mix.
The embedded RoomSense mics pick up sound from the room, the stage, or the instruments around you to add ambience to your personal headphone mix when performing or practicing – or you can use the AUX input to feed an external monitor signal straight into Play Acoustic (and turn the AUX signal off the main output).
TC Helicon’s custom designed Guitar & Headphone Cable facilitates in-ear monitoring and guitar connection in a single simple plug-and-play experience. You get ample freedom to move while you rock out in practice or performance.
The VLOOP performance looper allows you to create complete guitar and vocal loops for solo jamming or impressive layered live performances. VLOOP is also handy for soundcheck: record a short phrase and walk out into the audience to check levels while your “virtual you” plays!
Now you can control your effects from a mic engineered for the sonic realities of modern vocal performance. Add the TC Helicon MP-75 – or the Sennheiser e835 FX.
Add a Switch-3 accessory pedal to extend your on-the-fly control. Put a Boost pedal on the first switch, your favorite Delay on the second, and Tap Tempo on the third – or any custom combination of Guitar and Vocal effects that suits your performance needs.
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