Recommendations needed: pitch shifting VSTs

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chimp_spanner
Posts: 2907
Joined: 06 Mar 2015

12 Aug 2019

Hey everyone! Looking for best recommendations for a real time pitch shifter, paid is fine. Needs to be low latency, good quality (preferably polyphonic), and automatable. So I can create things like risers, or fake whammy for guitar and other effects. Thanks!

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diminished
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12 Aug 2019

I recently hooked up Glitch RE -> Polar -> Reverb to some recordings of my toddler. I was laughing tears.

Do you like/know Polar? I think it's perfect for what you're after.

Then I had some more fun with Nectar and VocalSynth2, which are top notch, but the latency was 7000+ms. It could be due to iZotope's inter-plugin communication, but I guess quality and low latency are mutually exclusive in this case.

MAutoPitch from Melda is free to, so definitely check that out. When I tested it, it was very responsive!
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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diminished
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12 Aug 2019

There's also Graillon 2 Free&Paid and the Infected Mushroom Polyverse stuff. I have no experience with those but I heard they're good.

Edit: same goes for kiloHearts Pitch Shifter, $19.
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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bitley
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12 Aug 2019

I'd export that audio clip and tweak it with NNXT or NN19.

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diminished
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12 Aug 2019

bitley wrote:
12 Aug 2019
I'd export that audio clip and tweak it with NNXT or NN19.
chimp_spanner is looking for realtime application
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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bitley
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12 Aug 2019

Yeah but flipping the rack and messing with cables isn't too fun at times. I'm very fast with NNXT editing so it has become natural to me, hence I recommend it.

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chimp_spanner
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12 Aug 2019

I have Polar, yeah! I mean it's good, although I wish that PDC worked with it. The delay is quite severe, even at the short setting. I had never thought to try the pitch wheel on it though and it does seem to work well for risers. I did, however, just discover that my keyboards pitch wheel doesn't go all the way down. Which is a bummer as this is the 4th keyboard I've tried in a year on account of pitch wheel problems. *sigh* Better send an email I guess!

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diminished
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12 Aug 2019

chimp_spanner wrote:
12 Aug 2019
I have Polar, yeah! I mean it's good, although I wish that PDC worked with it. The delay is quite severe, even at the short setting. I had never thought to try the pitch wheel on it though and it does seem to work well for risers. I did, however, just discover that my keyboards pitch wheel doesn't go all the way down. Which is a bummer as this is the 4th keyboard I've tried in a year on account of pitch wheel problems. *sigh* Better send an email I guess!
Does your keyboard have assignable knobs? Initialize Polar, and map one knob of your controller to the main pitch knob in Polar. You know, until you've figured out that malfunction of yours with a slow customer service.

I've just tried Polar with 64 and 128 samples buffer size, on "fast" and "classic". The delay is okay if you're not singing staccato polyrythms.
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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diminished
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12 Aug 2019

For testing purposes I also upped my sample rate to 96kHz and 192kHz. Now that's what I call realtime.
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

splitpen
Posts: 141
Joined: 22 Mar 2017

12 Aug 2019

Melda plug-ins have a free one, low latency and a lot of tweak options

https://www.meldaproduction.com/product ... yword=free
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Boombastix
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12 Aug 2019

If you gonna do risers you can try frequency shifting. Kilohearts has one.

The PITCH shifter that rule them all is Zplane ElastiquPitch. They know it so you have to pay for the quality.

To sweep:
On FX type sounds Polar is usually good enough, and Smooth/Fast can be better than Smooth/Slow.

On monophonic tones Polar starts to suffer a bit and the Fast/Smooth setting has to be dialed in depending on if you pitch down or up, so to sweep you will get artifacts. Not on Zplane.

On chords sounds Polar has the same issue but more pronounced. Sometimes quite OK, sometimes horrible. Not on Zplane.

Static shift:
If you just need a static shift Polar can dial it in quite well, but needs Slow on chords and will loose all transients. Not on Zplane. On mono material you can use Polar in Fast and transients remain, works more or less like Zplane.

You can also dial in a static setting with kHs Pitchshifter quite successfully. kHs is no bueno for sweeps.

X-tra:
Zplane can also shift the formant - that is golden!!!

I have not tried Little Alterboy for these type of sounds and glides, so don't know about that one. But its formant control sounds just like Neptune, but gives occasional artifacts (probably octave jumps) that Neptune manages w/o problems.
If you want better formant sound than Neptune, then your answer is, guess... ...Zplane. iZotope Vocalsynth has good formant too.
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DebbySherr
Posts: 1
Joined: 16 Oct 2020

16 Oct 2020

Hello....you may have better karma cobbling together your own formant rectification: Look at your non-moved examples of different notes on a spectrogram and see where the formants remain moderately consistent contrasted with the essentials. At that point rig up an equal cycle with a hybrid isolating those freqs (and higher), directed to two distinctive time-steady pitch shifters. It will take some testing and tweaking, since the cycle can't be realtime.... yet, when you've discovered the recipe for a given instrument and playing style, it should remain stable.

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Last edited by DebbySherr on 04 Nov 2020, edited 1 time in total.

MattLeschuck
Posts: 125
Joined: 05 Oct 2018

16 Oct 2020

Of what i own (Polar, RX7, Grallion, Stock DAW pitch shifters, and KHS pitch shifter). KHS pitch shifter almost always gives the cleanest results. I use this ALOT in game audio production.

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