Curious if someone has used a realtime pitch shifting VST processor to transpose the audio up or down (mostly down) to accommodate a singer “having a bad day” every now & then? I know there are now half decent guitar stomp pedal that do this.
For example, I have a single 88 key controller and a rackpace for “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” with many many Midi In blocks triggering many oneshot samples spread across the keys - lots triggered by a single note midi-in block. Took hours and days to lay out - I was trying to see if I can avoid using Variations in many of my racks - a ridiculous notion, which I’ve since abandoned If I transpose gobally, 90% of my layout will be unuseable.
I have a bunch of pitch shifters from waves, Izotope, soundtoys you name it, but none are high enough quality in stereo or have low enough latency. Even for now, I wouldn’t care about quality, just need something the singer can test to.
Real time pitch shift does not exist. All pitch shifters needs some buffering to analyze and transpose, the bigger the buffering the longest will take to do the job but also rhe higher the quality. For vocals and tracks i can not really recommend any cause im guitar player, but for guitar, and in my opinion, the best one is the poly whammy in helix native by line 6.
Gave that a shot today, but couldn’t get it to work in GP, think because Mac OS (12.5) couldn’t recognize it as coming from a ‘legit’ developer. I remember that there’s a way around that, but didn’t have time to try that. Anyone have luck with it? (on Mac?)
I tried kuassa and no way it beats helix. In kuassa you don’t have to much control over buffer/quality. In kuassa I heard some artifacts. Helix has also the polyphonic shifting but you need to use the specific “poly” effect cause there are some legacies that are monophonic and not that good
SOLD! This fit the bill… cheap enough - $25 - and not terrible :). 0 samples latency, low CPU. I’m never gonna use it “dynamically”, just knocking down a semitone or two. Perfect for quick n dirty emergencies at the Gig. THANKS!
The issue with the Poly Wham in Helix is its tendency to warble and distort notes, even when the pedal position is set to 0. While it may handle multiple notes more effectively than the mono Wham or Kuassa, its use becomes highly unpleasant when alternating between unpitched and pitched sections.
In my opinion, Kuassa and the mono Pitch Wham on the Helix have less latency and perform more efficiently as a Whammy tool. Additionally, they appear to be less resource-intensive than the Poly Wham.
Also, I want to mention the Wow pedal on Archetype Gojira X. I find it a bit more precise than the others (and I also notice less warbling on the global transpose in comparison to the Poly Capo in Helix).
Tom Morello’s Archetype also has a Whammy and a dive bomb, but I haven’t tested them.
The downside is latency, as Gojira X and other NDSP plugins add more than 1ms to the chain (even more when using pitch effects)
Oh boy, well, i dont doubt about your experience but i never noticed the issue you mentioned with helix native. Myabe i did but i was more related to the midi pedal controller as i hadt go calibrate the heel zone with a dead area. That said, if the expression pedal is not moving, the pitch controller/bar does not move, and i could leve th fx on with out the issue you just mentioned. Could you share a video maybe? Thx
It would take some time to record and share a video
Try a simple experiment: set up a Pitch wham block and a poly wham block on your Helix chain, both set to 0 (no pitch change) and play a few chords alternating between them. Try chords with thirds and sevenths.
Pitch wham seems to keep my guitar sound almost intact while Poly Wham changes the transients and the note behaviour substantially
Hey! It’s been a while since I last posted here, but this week YouTube suggested a video from McRoclin / PolychromeDSP about their new HyperTune plugin:
The demo version’s only limitation is a 3-second audio cut every minute. I have to say I’m impressed. To me, it sounded less warbly than NDPS, Kuassa, and Helix Native. The latency is also lower.
It seems to be developed as a fixed pitch-shifting tool, but I had good results using it as a Whammy pedal by changing the mode switch to “Smooth.” The only downside on my PC is that when I reach position zero, there’s a small audio pop (I think that is the plugin disengaging).
The downside of a good real-time audio pitch plugin is that you need a very powerful machine to use it, not to mention the power consumption of all the other associated plugins…
If I transpose gobally, 90% of my layout will be unuseable.
