It wasn't cool when Cher did it, but it was freakin' awesome when T-Pain did it, and now the TC Helicon VoicTone Synth lets you do it, too, and for the first time lets you recreate the effect live. "It" being that now-ubiquitous jagged auto-tune vocal effect as heard on nearly ever track of that weird new Kanye album. Is it a trend of the month? Probably not: Eiffle 65 was doing it back in 1999. Still, you might want to grab your VoiceTone Synth sooner rather than later, you know what I mean?

Besides, there's plenty of features on the VoiceTone Synth other than the Hard-Tune effct. The pedal has a "Massive-Band" vocoding effect built in that's got a scalable band-resolution control. It can either sound like modern, ultra-articulate vocal processors or like the classic, low-band-count vocoders of yesteryear. Think of it as an effect you can adjust to match how confident you feel about your own lyric-writing ability. Using your voice as the exciter, the VoiceTone Synth processes any instrument input with the generated envelopes.

The pedal also sports a nifty "Voice Controlled Synth" mode that doesn't require any secondary input. In this mode your voice triggers a built-in waveform generator, not unlike guitar or bass synth pedals, it seems. The tone, pitch, and filter envelope are generated form the same source (can't wait to hear how that tracks).

Here's a full features list:

• HardTune effect with user-selectable key or instrument-sensing
• Vocoder carrier can be driven by internal voice-controlled synth or instrument input (such as guitar)
• Transducer effects, such as megaphones, distortion and radio voices
• All effects can run simultaneously
• Includes Tone feature for adaptive live engineer sound processing
• Presets that can be edited and stored
• Instrument Thru allows normal instrument amplification and vocoding

Check TC Helicon's website for pricing and availability announcements.