Harmony and tuning – TC-Helicon Quintet Manual User Manual

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HARMONY AND TUNING

Scale (Scalic) mode
Harmonies use key and scale information to
create musically correct, diatonic harmonies.
Most popular songs use a single scale, so you
usually only have to set the Quintet to that
same scale at the beginning of your song.
“Scalic” harmonies are more dynamic than the
chordal harmonies because there are unique
harmony notes for each input note. The illus-
tration below shows the harmony notes for the
C major scale with a voicing selection of a C
major scale and a single “third above” harmo-
ny voice.

You can see from the diagram that the “Scalic”
harmonies are intelligent and closely follow
your lead voice for a tighter sound.

Black = Lead; Grey = Harmony

Under the HARMONY key is a parameter
called S

MOOTHING

. When set to 100% the har-

mony voices follow your input pitch, errors and
all, but when set to 0% the harmonies will
jump directly to the scalic harmony notes, like
a hard pitch correction on the harmony voice.
Setting the S

MOOTHING

parameter between 0

and 100% is like having variable amounts of
pitch correction on the harmonies.

It is also tricky to pick out the key in some
songs. An example is “Sweet Home Alabama”.
Listening, you might think this song is in the
key of “D”, as that’s the first chord, but the har-
monies actually work best in the key of “G” --
try running the song through Quintet to hear
for yourself.

The Quintet has five preprogrammed harmony
scales: three major, three minor and one cus-
tom per preset.

Setting the scale can also take a bit of practice:
for songs centered around the third or root of
the scale it might not sound like there’s any
noticeable differences between the three major
or three minor scales. This is because your
song doesn’t hit any of the scale’s altered
notes. A melody centered around the fifth of the
scale, (such as B in the key of E), highlights
the differences between the scales. Try the
“Sha Lala Lala ...La Tee Daa” chorus of Van
Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” (key: E, scale:
major, 3rd above voicing) with each major
scale to hear the audible difference between
them. For the minor scales, Santana’s “Evil
Ways” (key: G, scale: minor, 3rd above voicing)
highlights the differences between the three
minor scales.

The following table illustrates the third and fifth
above for a given input note to illustrate the dif-
ferences between the six different scales. “nc”
means no change, in that the harmony voice
will simply keep its previous pitch until the lead
voice pitch changes to a non “nc” note. For
complete voicing information see our website
at www.tc-helicon.com

Thicken Mode
Thicken mode presets do not produce harmony
voices, instead they produce voices in unison
with the input voice. The unison voices have
pitch and time humanization applied to them to
make them sound as if sung by another per-
son.

Dim7

Bbb

(equiv. to A)

Dom7

Dom7b5

E Gb

Aug

E G#

Aug7

E G#

Sus

F G

Sus2

D G

Sus7

F G