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The Harmony-G XT is built to TC's usual rigourous standards.

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There was time when it was only guitarists who used stompboxes, but lately vocalists have been getting in on the act with specialised pedals that can generate harmonies, add reverb and even correct their out of tune warblings.

We've already taken a look at the various models in the DigiTech Vocalist range that can automatically generate vocal harmonies dependent on an input signal from your guitar. Now up for review is the TC-Helicon VoiceTone Harmony-G XT, which does a similar trick.

The Harmony-G XT is the successor to TC-Helicon's Harmony-G vocal effect and takes some features from the more upmarket VoiceLive 2. It's designed to provide a variety of effects to enhance any singing performance including, among others, harmony generation, doubling effects, reverb, delay, compression and automatic chromatic pitch correction.

Operation of the Harmony-G XT revolves around 10 programmable presets arranged in five banks as variations A and B. You can step through the banks with the preset button and switch between the A or B variations with the left footswitch. Each preset can be built up from several elements.

You get two harmony voices (Voice 1 and Voice 2), each of which can be chosen from six options or simply be inactive. Voice 1 offers higher, high, low, lower, bass or octave up harmonies, while Voice 2 replaces the octave up option with octave down.

You also can have no effects or a choice of hall reverb, room reverb, echo, slap, combi or SFX. The levels of the effects and the harmony voices are set by separate knobs and each of the effects has selectable variations.

On top of this you can engage the double button, which activates a doubling effect (with four different options) on your voice that you can use alone or in tandem with the harmony voices, and there's a tone button that with a single press adds what TC calls 'Adaptive Live Engineer Effects' - a combination of EQ, compression, de-essing and gating - to smooth the vocals.

A double press on the tone button engages the automatic pitch correction if you want to add that in as well. A thru jack takes the guitar signal to your amp, although it can be mixed in with the voice signal if required and share the reverb, the relative levels set by a knob that has an auto setting and an area in its travel when the guitar is muted.

The idea is that you play your guitar to generate vocal harmonies, although there's also manual selection of scale and key for singers without an instrument or horn players. You can also use a guitar to manually set a key by playing a chord and holding both footswitches down.

TC's VoiceSupport software is included and is designed for backing up and restoring user presets and installing any updates to the pedal.