 Hey, it's Ellie Hart from TC Helicon and this is the quick start video manual for the critical mass stomp box. So you've just got your critical mass pedal and you're like, how do I use this thing? The first thing you want to do is actually make sure that the firmware is up to date. So you need to go to your computer, go to our website and download our voice support to software. We've actually got a video that says how to do a firmware update and I'll include that video link in the description below. You've also got a link there for the actual software so you can go download it from there. And then you're going to use the USB on the back of the panel here to actually go into your computer and do that firmware update. Okay, so you've done that. Now you're back here at this video again and we're going to get this thing all hooked up and ready to go. So you can either use batteries. They're located under this panel. You just need a Phillips head screwdriver to pop that screw off and put in your four AA batteries. If you don't want to use batteries, there is a power supply option. It's not actually included with a power supply, but it's your standard guitar pedal nine volt power supply that you can get from any music store. Okay, so that's what I'm going to use today. I've got it here ready to go and that goes into this. I'm just going to make sure always that it is turned off before I plug it in. Now we're plugged in. I'm actually going to leave it off until I get all of my connections set up. So the one next to that is out. This is my XLR cable that's going to go from our stomp box to your PA, your mixer, your speaker, wherever it is you're sending the audio from this. So I've got that all ready to go. I'm using a mixer as going to my PA system and that's this black XLR that goes in there. Just want to make sure that it's all the way and you hear that nice click confirming that you've done your job and plugged it in correctly. I've got my microphone all set up with this nice blue XLR cable and that's going to go into the microphone in right there. Again, make sure that it's all the way in. You can hear a nice click and you're good to go. So now we've got everything plugged in and I'm going to make sure that all of my sliders on my PA are in the down position so I don't turn this thing on and make a whole bunch of noise. So I've done that already. I know that they're down and they're good to go and I'm going to go ahead and turn it on. As soon as I do that, these LEDs start flashing and I know that it's on. So critical mass is a really great pedal for crowd effect. Effect is what we call it, gang vocal and we've called it critical mass. So we've got two different styles. We've got our melodic crowd sounds and our gang crowd sounds. Before we get into that, I'm going to tell you a couple other little things about this pedal before we jump into it. So it can power phantom power. It's 24 volt phantom power, not 48. So just check your microphone if you are using a condenser. Make sure that you check the user guide and that it is a 24 volt mic, not a 48 volt phantom power. There's no button or anything to trigger it. It'll just automatically know whether or not it needs to be powering it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is this little LED light up here is actually a sensor for the batteries. So if you do have batteries in there, which I do not, so it's not lit up right now, it'll be green for, yes, your batteries are fully charged and good to go. It's going to go orange if they're starting to lose some of their power. And when it goes red, it means it's time to change your batteries. All right, well, let's dive into it. So tone is this button here. When it's off, there's no light and when it's on, there's a red light and you just trigger that by clicking that button. Adaptive tone is a feature that we have. It's really great if you don't have a sound guy. It does all of your adaptive EQ, compression and gating. It's going to make you sound really, really great. So this is what it sounds like when I have it off. And this is what it sounds like when I have it on. As you can see, it adds a bunch of flavor and dimension to your voice. And it's just a really great feature. So we highly recommend using that if you don't have a sound guy. So I'm going to leave that on. And I'm going to start with our reverb. So reverb is always on. The foot switch actually triggers on the crowd effect rather than the reverb. So right now, I don't have any of those effects on. You can tell because this little LED is not lit up. As soon as I use the foot switch, it turns red. So let's just leave that off right now when we're setting up our reverb. So we have three different reverb styles. We've got room, club, and hall. Room is our shortest reverb. It's great for fast songs. Hall is our longer reverb and it's kind of better for slow songs. You'll see this yellow line that goes around. It kind of widens at each point. And that's the level of the amount of reverb that you have applied to your voice. So as it gets wider, you have more of that effect applied to your voice. So let's try it with not very much of the room. I'm going to put it all the way to the full level. Nice. That's room. Let's try club with minimal level. So for this demonstration purpose, I'm going to use club and I'm going to put it about halfway. Allow us to hear the other effects of the crowd quite nicely without hearing too much of the reverb while I'm demonstrating that. So the next knob over is our mix. And that's referring to the mix between your lead vocal and the crowd effect. So if you want your lead vocal to stand out in front of the crowd, you're going to put it more towards the lead side. If you want to blend right in with the crowd, you're going to put it onto the crowd side. So let's trigger on our style and we use a foot switch to do that. You can see the light is now lit up. And I'm going to start by demonstrating with the lead more forefront to the crowd. So we've got our four different styles of melodic crowd vocal and four different styles of gang crowd vocal. So we've got on both sides, unison as an option, octave up, octave down and octave up and down. So let's go through these and you can hear the different vocals or different effects. So melodic is really great for that. We will rock you style of song from Queen. So let's give that a demo. Again, that's with lead forefront in the mix. So let's try it with crowd forefront in the mix. We will we will rock you. This is octave up, octave down, and this is with lead more forefront in the mix. We and this is with crowd. We will we will rock you. OK, let's do octave down with lead vocal more front in the mix. We will we will rock you. And with crowd more blended. We will and finally octave up and down lead more forefront in the mix. We will we will rock you. And with my voice totally blended out. We will we will rock you. Great. So those are all of our melodic crowd noises, crowd effects. And we've got our four gang crowd effects. This is more of your ho hey style of effect. So let's try with the lead more forefront. And this first one is unison. Hey, ho, let's go. And we'll do more crowd. Hey, ho, let's go. Octave up, lead more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. And crowd more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. Octave down, lead more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. And crowd more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. Finally, octave up and down lead more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. And crowd more forefront. Hey, ho, let's go. Cool. So it's really fun. You just need to play around with it and figure out what's going to work best for the song that you're currently working with. So here's a couple of other things you can do out of the box. This foot switch is in what we call latched mode. So when you engage it, it's going to just be on until you unengage it. You can also put it into momentary mode where you hold it down for as long as you want to be engaged. And as soon as you lift it up, it's going to be unengaged. So how you do that is you power the device off. And you're going to hold down this tone button while you power it back on. So I'm going to hold that down, turn it back on. And now you'll notice it automatically comes off as soon as I unengage. So if you want to put it back, turn it back off again, hold down that tone button and power it back on. So it's totally up to you which one works best for you. And it's very nice to have that option now. Because Harmony is always engaged, no matter whether this button is pressed in or not, if you're addressing a crowd between songs, you don't want that reverb on there. So all you're going to do is you're going to hold down this button and all of those effects come off, nice dry vocal. So I'll show you again. Hey everybody, how's it going? Oh, you can understand me. I'm going to hold this down for a few seconds and now I have a nice dry vocal to talk to my audience with. And finally, if you are using a MP75 which has our mic control on it, you can trigger effects just like you would with a foot switch but with your microphone. This is really handy if you're rocking out on the other side of the stage and you realize that the point of the song where this effect is going to be coming on is coming up and you're not going to be able to make it back to that mic stand of yours. You can use mic control instead. Okay, so all you're going to do is hold down this foot switch while you power on. There we go. And now this is going to engage the switch. You can see that red LED is turning on and off. Great, super simple. I hope you found that helpful. If you did, please like the video. If you have any questions at all, feel free to throw them in the comment section below and I'll do my best to answer them. And please subscribe to our channel. We update new videos all the time with tutorials on how to use our products. Thanks guys.