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Straight delay is one thing, harmonizing is quite another. It's
like comparing an engine to the whole car, in terms of additional
complexity...
I really dont have *any* experience with the Eventide stuff, I
only know that their hallmark is that their's works well. I have
played with a Yamaha SPX-90, which can do pitch shifts in real time.
One of the things I noticed about this device, it that the quality
of the sounds coming out went down as one asked for greater "shift".
Which was to be expected. A suprise came, however, in that you could
also specify how long the processor could process before giving
output. As expected, the longer it had to operate on the input signal,
the better the sound quality was that eventually emerged.
Of course, to do an octave below, you had to wait half a second
to get the nice sounding output! Hardly acceptable for a performance
situation!
My guess at this point, considering the operation of the SPX-90,
is that the newer models are putting more compute horsepower into
the signal processing, much in the same way that the latest "PC's"
run umpteen times faster than an "AT". Thus, they can arrive at
a quality product in terms of the signal *sooner* than the previous
generation, perhaps for all intents and purposes, in "real time"
- no matter what the "shift" asked for is.
I think it would be fun to have an all guitar band, with the
"bass chores" being rotated via an analog MUX around the guitar
players. Whoever "got to play bass" on a particular song would still
be playing guitar, but it'd come out as "bass" by being shifted
down one octave in real time, via one of these machines.
Joe Jas
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| > Digital pitch shifters can generally handle chords much better than
> analog units, with little or no distortion.
I'm not sure this is true.
I think all the pitch shifters that are out today aren't intended
to "handle chords". I'm not sure there's much value to handling
chords (if you can generate a chord you probably don't need a
pitch shifter).
I do know that if you give the Digitech IPS or the Eventide H-3000
a chord, they give you back mush.
I did finally get a chance to sit down and play with an IPS. I was
very pleasantly surprised. It works well, and is very flexible with
very little in the way of "glitches".
The positives are:
o It tracks incredibly fast (much better than the pitch-to-MIDI
guitar controllers)
o It sounds great. In fact, there was one very unexpected plus.
I had it plugged into the effects loop of a Mesa Boogie amp.
I expected it to sound mushy when harmonizing with a 3rd and
a 5th (major triad). Try playing a major triad into any amp
with a distortion setting and you typically get a pretty
mushy sound because of the third not being a natural harmonic
of the root. Generally the chord voicings that "work" in
distortion settings are either wide intervals or harmonics.
But when I played the triad with the harmonizer, it sounded
like 3 guitars all playing lead! Everyone in the store had
thought Brian May had walked in because it really sounded like
him. I was very impressed, although I think it's more a
function of how you incorporate the unit in your rig (the
manual described how to use it with a distortion setting)
than a "feature" particular to THIS harmonizer.
o It's fully featured. It's got all the important scale types,
and if that's not enough, you can define your own. I defined
the following scale:
Note C D E F G
1st Harmony E F G A C
2nd Harmony G A C C E
The interesting aspect of this "scale" is that you play any
note in the C major chord and you get a C major chord or an
inversion. It also works for D minor (and I could extend it
to work for certain passing tones as well).
I had a blast playing fully harmonized C major and D minor
arpeggios. It really sounded cool
o It has a bunch of detune settings which make it useful as a
sound colorer, special effect and stereo effect. In fact, detuning
can be a VERY dramatic stereo effect and I can think of a few
of places where you wouldn't use other stereo effects (delay efx,
eq-stacking, panning, etc.) where detuning would work just fine.
BAD POINTS:
o The instrument is very sensitive to tuning. Not surprisingly,
you have to tune TO the instrument (it has a "tuning mode").
If your guitar is too far out of tune with the IPS, it glitches
and you get all sorts of really undesireable things happening
(wrong harmonization, flip-flopping between notes cause it can't
figure out what note your playing, etc.)
Oddly enough, it isn't "bothered" by MODERATE vibrato. I guess
as long as the vibrato is centered on the right pitch, it'll
get it right.
o String bends USUALLY work (which is actually somewhat counter
intuitive given the last bullet item). When I say work, that
means that the harmonized notes "bend" with the input signal.
However, occasionally the unit cause the pitch to take an abrupt
jump instead of a bend.
None of the glitches seemed terribly bothersome for recording. If
you were playing live and wanted to use the harmonizer after some
dive bombs or something like that you'd be taking a risk. You
basically just have to have a guitar that stays in tune very well
(even without the dive bombs).
It's on my shopping list, although I'd love to see some other companies
come out with some smart shifters.
db
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