Need some quick help on a Heil Talk Box

[Karaoke Karl]

Need some quick help on a Heil Talk Box
A buddy of mine who is a big time dance music producer just purchased the Heil Talkbox . He is using this for recording in the studio only, and not live.

Is it OK to use the Talkbox with a Pod without using an amp head? His signal path is the Guitar -> Pod -> Talkbox -> Mixer. He then has a nice condenser mic to record everything to. His problem is that the signal coming from the talkbox tube is very low. He has checked the tube for kinks and all other
connections seem secure. Should he be able to hear the effect loud in his mouth before being on a mic? Should it be almost normal talking level? OR is it a very low level output? Right now he has to really crank the mic input to get a decent level to tape.

Any comments or help is appreciated. Thanks.....

[lkrepp]

The POD is not an amplifier. The signal it puts out is line level and barely enough to power the speaker that is the major part of the talk box. Get an amp and hook up the talkbox to the speaker jack of the amp.

[Jackyrhode]

I have a combo and had to return a Heil at xmas because of it. You need a head and a pa to get it working right.

I still want a talk box . Anybody try the Banshee or the Danelectro FreeSpeech? neither of them need a separate amp but I want to know if they're any good.

[Dr. Vintage]

This is a really old thread and I suspect Karl has his question answered by now, but since someone asked about the Banshee, I'll answer.

I have one and absolutely love it. It's got drive and tone and level controls, and really does the job. We have a full time sound person running our board, and he says it really cuts nicely in the mix. I love not having to have a separate amp to drive the thing. It also has a speaker output jack that you can run to a speaker cab to make a little living-room practice amp out of it.

A couple of gripes:

It uses a wall-wart power supply, but that's Rocktron for ya!

In the "talk-box" mode, it kills the signal to your amp... which can be good and bad. If you're the only guitarist in the band, it's nice to have the original signal back there keeping things full. But it's not a deal-killer.

It doesn't truly bypass the internal amp when in the normal mode. A little bit of something leaks into the signal. That's fine for low-gain settings on my amp (I use a Mesa TriAxis-based rack system). But when I have a high-gain setting, that little leakage gets amplified a bit. Not terrible, but noticeable. I'm going to poke around inside and see if I can modify the switching.

Otherwise, I highly recommend the Banshee.