How do you feel about pitch shifters?

[Addicted To Pain]

A few of us guitar players derailed the topic of the thread about The End Will Show Us How, so I thought that it would be fitting to continue the discussion here.

How does everybody feel about pitch shifters? Do you think that it changes the sound of the guitar too much, or does it not bother you? What kind of pitch shifters do you use?

[Dolo]

Like I mentioned in the other thread I use 'Simple Pitch' pedal at the very beginning of the chain (it's actually right after the volume and wah pedals, but those are not swappable) in my Line 6 POD Go, I've tried it with clean, crunch and high gain stuff and it works very well as long as you go down, tuning up will get you latency and artefacts the higher you go. I keep my main band guitar in Drop C#, we shift pitch to Drop B and it sounds alright. It works for single notes, chords, bending, natural harmonics, pinch harmonics, with effects, without effects.
I tried going lower than that but haven't tested it enough to say for sure if it works well in those cases as well.
One thing you should keep in mind is that your volume knob has to be at 10, otherwise it goes wobbly, especially with a lot of gain.
It terms of hearing the actual pitch of the string while playing - well, at home I've got my headphones on and the output volume is high enough I almost never hear it bleeding over. While rehearsing or performing live the whole band is loud enough the difference is not audible at all.

[TenaciousBe]

Would that work on an acoustic? Such a hassle moving the capo around all the time.

[Dolo]

Would that work on an acoustic? Such a hassle moving the capo around all the time.

Unlikely. You'd still hear the original pitch coming out of the sound hole of the guitar which is quite loud. Plus, since you mentioned moving the capo around, you'd like to tune up which does not work so well with pitch shifting. My band's got song one when I use a capo instead of pitching up for that very reason.

[Dolo]

Just did a small experiment: I changed pitch from C# to A# and A, so respectively 1,5 and 2 steps, played for about an hour and noticed very little artefacts on high gain and crunch despite playing some weird, extended intervals. The aftefacts started to occur as soon as I went completely clean and started playing stuff like Gmadd9 and the artefacts got more audible the higher the notes were. As soon as I started dialing in more and more gain, the less of them there were which is interesting, cause I thought the result will be the other way around: latency and artefacts with gain and none of that with a clean tone. Seems I would need to dive into that whole thing a bit more, cause my band plans to play pitch shifted tunes in the future with some more elaborate clean parts.

[Crumbso]

I've used the Digitech Drop pedal and the Quad Cortex pitch shifter. They both do well for hard-picking rock or metal with simpler chords and single note lines.

No pitch shifter I've used is able to be used for my jazz gigs, they all wobble and artefact on gentle, clean, complex or sustained chords.

All pitch shifters I've tried introduce maybe a couple of milliseconds of latency, which is a totally acceptable rate for live work.

In terms of tone change, they usually seem to take some high end and low end out of the tone, making it seem a bit blunted but it's not something I would be concerned about for rock or metal gigs.

I would never use a pitch shifter for studio work though, unless is was for like a whammy or octave effect.

I would be interested in trying out something like a Line 6 Variax, the always sounded pretty authentic in video demos and the flexibility they would offer a gigging musician could be huge.

[Addicted To Pain]

I would be interested in trying out something like a Line 6 Variax, the always sounded pretty authentic in video demoes and the flexibility they would offer a gigging musician could be huge.

We bought a Line 6 Variax about six years ago, but it was lacking all of its hardware, so we basically used it as an experiment guitar. It does not have the cool stuff that the actual models have. I wish that it did.

[Crumbso]

I would be interested in trying out something like a Line 6 Variax, the always sounded pretty authentic in video demoes and the flexibility they would offer a gigging musician could be huge.

We bought a Line 6 Variax about six years ago, but it was lacking all of its hardware, so we basically used it as an experiment guitar. It does not have the cool stuff that the actual models have. I wish that it did.

This is pretty crazy, I like 12 Foot Ninja, too -

[Dolo]

This is pretty crazy, I like 12 Foot Ninja, too -

I remember watching this one when it came out thinking it was over the line. And now i use pretty much the same technology on a daily basis