Looping and Pitch Shift

The Looper's Delight
Interesting Posts Series:

Looping and Pitch Shift

Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 15:08:31 -0400
From: cwb@platinum.com (Clark Battle)

I dont have a looper (yet) but here's a neat idea. Send the output of the looping device of your choice out to a pitch shifter pedal. That way you can transpose entire loops into new keys easily. An intelligent harmonizer would be best but im sure a Digitech Whammy pedal would work just fine. Simple but effective.

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 13:50:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: The Man Himself

I've tried this before. If you're looking for clean transposition, forget the Whammy pedal, since it imbues any signal containing more than one basic note with a gurgling warblish sound. The first five minutes of owning it, I freaked out over this ideosyncrasy, but have since come to enjoy it for its own demented purposes.

It is a very wierd effect, using the Whammy to alter loops, because you get a tape-speed kind of pitch effect, but the speed of the loop remains constant. So you're expecting to hear the loops drop in rate as the pitch decreases, but it doesn't. Perty odd, to say the least.

Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 17:29:57 -0700
From: studio seventeen productions

This "idiosyncrasy" is definitely annoying...BUT, it is a very interesting tool...especially if you do odd things like set the WHAMMY II to two octaves up and then run it thru your TSR-24S set to ONE OCTAVE DOWN...and then vary the pitch of either or both. VERY strange possibilities there.

If the funny noise problem would go away, this would be the perfect pitch pedal. It's far more intuitive to use than any rack mount harmonizer, but it has a great range of features. (Programming the Programmable Whammy in the TSR-24S is quite involved...no glitches, but unless I want to spend 30 hours emulating all the stuff the "II"...you get the idea.

Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 10:48:19 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Olivier Malhomme

I've tried also once the whammy. With a distorted sound, you gain on the sound and loose those blurble (in part) when routing the whammy before the distortion. Of course a lot of function of the thing are lost if distortion come after (lika having two voices making intervals)

An other thing.
once I ried something that i now will call "organ synthesis".
Duh?

By using two diferent pitchshifter, on set an octave above, with regeneration, and the other one octave lower than your signa, and with a bit of regeneration too.

You route them in way that they are serial (is it english?) well, anyway, one goes into another. play then guitarn Stick, whatever you want, and you get an hammond sound (wel, do not exagerate too much olivier, will you?) Ok, an organ sound. Your shifter(s) are like drawbars and the basic tone voice of the thing is your instrument.

Nice effect, powerfull sound, and a bit strange like something you know, but it is not exactly what it used to be....

Date: Sun, 29 Sep 96 13:27:21 CST
From: "Todd Madson"

Re: Olivier's "Organ Synthesis":

Olivier: I did this on a track called "Ghosts" with two ART SGE's, and two Digitech GSP5's at one point about three years ago and got a similar result. Check out http://www.waste.org/~crash/index.html and click the crash icon - you can download a sample of what it sounded like. ... It maintains the guitaristic elements of your instrument, but sounds a bit...odd.

Glad to see someone else stumbled across this too.