DIY Pitch Shifter that sounds good

Started by KMS, June 12, 2006, 01:13:42 AM

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KMS

I have spent the last week or so playing around with pitch shifting.....mostly research and I tried to mod a smartlab voice changer and it sounds like crap.

So I went on an all out search for sound clips of many of the favorite Octave and Pitchshifting DIY pedals and discovered that every single sound clip I listened to sounds like crap....I can't figure why anyone would even post those clips.

Is there a sound clip of a DIY Pitchshifter and or Octave pedal that sounds good....you know....where you don't hear any over tones except the one or two tones that you select.

If not then I'm inclined to just buy the BOSS ME-50 and keep my soldering gun ready for DIY tremolo, DIY routers, DIY mixers, DIY compressors, DIY noise gates and the very few other DIY circuits that actually sound good.

I was really set back by the crappy sounding clips especially at Tone Frenzy and all of the other clips from other sited too. Those sound terrible.  Distortion with all that gating sound...pops and clicks when the pedals are engaged and disengaged.....and no high notes held out to the end so we can hear how the note feeds back as the string stops vibrating. 

Is there some place that has some good sound clips for these DIY pedals especially Pitchshifting or Octave pedals?

DIY with-a-little-help from my freinds
DIY with-a-little-help from my freinds

Paul Perry (Frostwave)

If you want a smooth and artifact-free pitch shifting effect, it has to be done digitally.

christian

The octave pedals aren't really pitch-shifters. Octave-up effects just use a simple hack to double any incoming frequency, but they change the whole waveform that always causes some distortion on its own and thats why they usually have fuzz to come with them.

Octave-down pedals do their thing with logical chips and square-waves, and thats what the outcome usually is, even though theres a technique to affect the original signal with the square wave 1 octave down to soften it out.

Real pitch-shifters are totally different. Theres no simple way to do this, just buy a whammy IMHO :(
One on GGC uses a real lofi chip and thats probably what the smartlab voice changer is about, and it does sound like crap.

There is one japanese DIY pitch shifter which is totally analog, but I havent heard what it sounds like and theres no project files for it, just a raw schematic.
I think Mark Hammer has posted it on his site?

ch.
who loves rain?

Christ.