Pitchfactor, saxophone and voices

[Stax_911]

I am sorry to say that I sold my Pitchfactor two days ago.

I used it for years to create harmonies with my saxophone and my voice. But finally the sound is clearly too synthetic for this usage and the tracking is not precise (even with the Mixing Link). 

More generally Eventide pedals are really too much “guitar oriented ». It’s not true that they works well with these instruments. It’s ok if you want to create synthetic and weird effects but not a natural and beautiful sound. I am still looking for videos on the web of a singer using a pitchfactor to create natural harmonies…

 

Another example : a few weeks ago I send on this forum  a question about the sample rate of the eventide stompboxes. And the Eventide answer was : « be aware that these are guitar pedals, so the overall sound is more important than the digital stuff ». I still don’t have the precise answer. Is it secret ?

For saxophone’s and voice’s sound the digital process is essential. I need to know what are the conversion and sample rates because it really changes everything.

 

Do you care users which are not guitarists ? What about developing algorithms for singers and woodwinds ?

 

I sold my Pitchfactor for a tc helicon pedal which sound better with voices and sax. But I keep my H9 a good multieffect and the Mixing Link which is a useful preamp.

 

bye

 

[gkellum]

Stax_911 wrote:

 

More generally Eventide pedals are really too much "guitar oriented ». It's not true that they works well with these instruments. It’s ok if you want to create synthetic and weird effects but not a natural and beautiful sound. I am still looking for videos on the web of a singer using a pitchfactor to create natural harmonies…

 

 

To pitch shift the human voice well you need to take a different kind of approach to pitch shifting which is more processor intensive.  We have a module specialized for pitch shifting the human voice called UltraShift which is used in our rack products.  I suppose it wasn't used in the PitchFactor b/c that really was targeted toward guitar, and if we spent more processing power on pitch shifting any one voice, we would have needed to save processing power elsewhere by dropping other things that people liked.  PitchFactor maxes it out the processor it's running on.  So, it really is a zero sum game.  If you spend more on one feature, you have to drop another feature.

 

Stax_911 wrote:

 

Another example : a few weeks ago I send on this forum  a question about the sample rate of the eventide stompboxes. And the Eventide answer was : « be aware that these are guitar pedals, so the overall sound is more important than the digital stuff ». I still don't have the precise answer. Is it secret ?

For saxophone's and voice’s sound the digital process is essential. I need to know what are the conversion and sample rates because it really changes everything.

 

 

Well, it's basically CD quality sound.  But in any case I'm sure my colleague Nick didn't give you a precise answer b/c he didn't think it was relevant.  Other things have a much more noticeable quality on the sound than sample rate, and the sampling rate is high enough that the nyquist frequency is above the threshold of audible sound.

[Stax_911]

Thank you Gkellum for your answer. It sound clear now…

Any chance that one day Eventide create a stompbox with the ultra-shifter algo inside ? A human voice oriented effect box (and saxophone also) ?

It could be a very interesting choice singers and saxophonists like me …

Or another dream : just develop an algo for the H9 inspired by the ultra-shifter !  Using it with the Mixing Link could be a very good solution for singers…

 

[gkellum]

Well, we talked a few years ago about creating a version of the H9 that was specialized for voice processing.  We talk about different product ideas all the time of course.  If I remember correctly, we didn't get moving on this idea because some of the developers we needed to do this project were tied up doing other things.  We don't have it scheduled at the moment, but who knows?  We might end up doing something like this in the coming years.  

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