Harmonizer fans- opinions?

[chrisj]

So I'm trying to get together a harmonizer (old school Eventide style) for a customer who bought a bunch of plugs, and this is what I got so far: harmonizer fans, how's this doing? Sucks, in the ballpark, rules?

[Brendo]

no experience with eventides here, but the clicky poppy crap sucks, is that a buffer thing?

[chrisj]

It's a buffer thing- you can actually crank up the reaction speed until it's heavily glitching out. I'm trying to sort out what level of old-school glitch is desirable- after all it's easy to get really clean pitch shifting digitally, this is a buffer-mangler style pitch shifter.

Or maybe I'm just full of shit with this idea :D

I could always call it GLITCH shifter. Pitch shitter? :D

[Brendo]

Glitch Shitter!

[chrisj]

Actually I'm warming up to 'glitch shifter'... I just checked to make sure I wasn't imagining it, and sure enough some people like Laurie Anderson used old pitch shifters specifically to be glitchy. You're actually not hearing how utterly destroyed the sound can become when you really glitch it out :)

[Barish]

Glitch Shitter!


LOL!


Good effort Chris but sad to say that you are nowhere near my H3000SE, my man :Coolio:


But still, a pitch shifter plug-in could be good as there is a gap there out in the market. Why not you fill it?

Go fer it.

B.

[Brendo]

how bout you post a plain audio file and then the same file run thru your h3000se so chris has a reference?

[Barish]

I'd be more than happy to help either way. But if Chris sent me a reference wave file and told me what he wanted me to do with it so that he could replicate it, I think it would be more helpful than me supplying him something and him trying to figure out what the feck I've done in there.

There are tons of patches in that thing, not to mention the editable parameters and stuff. I don't even know most of them. No time for it.


Either way, it's fine by me.

:Thumbsup:

B.

[chrisj]

I think I can guess what 'glitchless pitch shifting' sounds like- that's a no-brainer. I need to sort out what to do with this one. Apple's AULab ships with a high-quality pitch shifter and it eats a lot of CPU but sounds very nice, but very vanilla. Either I'll clean this one up a bit, or glitch it out even more :)

[otek]

Would it be possible to have the glitching as an option? Like, a QC (Quality Control) pot that would run from "smooth" to "glitchy".

I suppose the good thing here is that the original Logic pitch shifter is not all that. There is certainly a market for a better version.

The feedback control is another interesting thing to look into.

And how about portamento instead of glissando, like the Digitech Whammy pedal.....? :) I mean as an option.... because that's definitely something most harmonizers don't offer.


Cheers,

otek

[Comte de St Germain]

As far as the early Eventide units (910/949) I'm very fond of the Audio Damage Dishord 2 which fits directly in Chris' current pricing scheme. IMO getting to the 3000 stage is a bit of an insane prospect. If we're talking straight pitch and no time/filter then well, I'm not interested in such a thing.

[chrisj]

Fooooock, the thing is giving me headaches. What I'm shooting for is actually a straight pitch shifter- maybe even a 'between zero and one octave up' pitch shifter, something that simple- but running off the same buffer interpolation I'm using for vibrato.

The trouble is, the glitch factor is kicking my butt dreadfully. I've coded a 'haas effect' ambience booster sort of to decompress from this awful glitch monster, and that's nice, but I promised a harmonizer of SOME sort. I've tried bucketloads of nifty ideas for splicing the buffers and instead I have nothing but pitifully broken output, much worse than the little mp3 I showed. (what I'm trying to do is splice waveforms with close enough attention to the region of the zero cross that the algorithm can deal with chords some of the time)

Bleah. Nothing to see here, folks.

Maybe within a couple days of busting my balls over this, I'll get something working. I have an ugly feeling that I'm going to have to recode basically from scratch. 'Cos the working code has glitch ALL over it. Currently it's doing a square-wave tremelo at a frequency I can't even identify, retaining bits of audio to repeat forever in chunks of half-digested buffer, and laughing at me. It will be a mercy killing :lol:

I do have to say though- I'm not going for a CLEAN pitch shift, like modern harmonizers. I am going for raw speeded-up buffer, only with invisible splice seams. By that I mean, no pops or ticks if I can help it, but possibly glitches that come from the sound itself being buffer-dislocated. Any sustained notes are supposed to be glitchless, unless you crank the tracking up so fast that the thing starts to gnaw its own arm off.

Fun fun fun!

I specifically am shooting for as close to zero crossfade region as I can get, doing it all with bizarre methods of recognizing periodic signals. I've had a _bit_ of success which is what keeps me bashing away at it. But the intent is not to be _clean_ harmonizer, much less 'formant correct, pristine pitch shift'. I want loads of gnarl and chipmunkification out of it, loads of texture, so it's gonna be buffer banging all the way from me, OK?

With a bit of luck it will get REALLY gnarly when pushed to track too quick, too, which will give lots of severely industrial noises for the asking. I like those too :)

[chrisj]

OK, back on the scene with a record machine... or a 'wrecker' machine...

This time you're hearing a really big delay buffer being used in conjuction with feedback to create a bizarre carnival of shifted voices. And this time- much less glitching and popping, even though we're splicing stuff onto other stuff with multiple pitch shifted overlays using a ONE SAMPLE crossfade!

I'm narrowing down what this is. The faster-tracking stuff is somewhat more glitchy, but it can be cranked up to where it's total glitch-gnarl and then given feedback- this is a sound destroyer like Buffer Override, basically. I will have to make sure to label it clearly as such. It _is_ possible to do fairly close-tracking fairly-clean simple harmony, but only with very fussy settings. I'm OK with that.

I can do even more outlandish demos- want to hear?

[Barish]

Outlandish D'Emo.

Wasn't that the Police album with the song "Reharmonize Yourself" with a dodgy sax solo?

Or was it "Ghost in The Machine", referring to the eventide model just came out?


Oh anyway...


Steve Vai would love this. He's the only one left interested in Zappa-ish use of harmonizers in this century.


"Moving to Montana soon... Gonna be a dental floss tycoon... yes I am..."


What else have you got?


I could still help you out in finding examples to study if you liked.

B.

[chrisj]

He had to ask... no, THIS is outlandish.

Anyone with no stomach for glitch, for God's sake don't listen. (does contain pretty octave chimey stuff in the beginning, though)

http://www.airwindows.com/m/GlitchShifter.mp3

The new ambience maker is very nice, and of course there's 24 other, nicer plugins, and I'm getting to work on a 'color' compressor having figured out what that's about. Sorry about the harmonizer. My love of glitch was waaaaay too strong :)

[CloseToTheEdge]

Hmmm, Eventide Harmonizer...

Brings back fond memories of the old Delorean.