NEWS

Company: Devious Machines

Product: Pitch Monster

Price: £59.99

Our Rating: 4.7/5

Pitch Monster is a new pitch-shifting plug-in from Devious Machines. With its granular, formant and robo-tastic vocoder engines, Pitch Monster goes far beyond ordinary pitch shifting. Pitch Monster offers the user up to 8 voices of polyphony across a 6-octave range. Each voice can have 8 voices of unison, giving you a maximum potential of 64 voices. This tool provides a huge amount of creative options when it comes to pitch processing.

Pitch Perfect

At the heart of this plugin are the 3 processing engines, granular, formant, and vocoder, each spreadable over pitch and time. The granular engine has a very smooth sound and is great for more basic pitch-shift effects, whilst the formant offers the more alien and otherworldly results. The vocoder engine is perfect for those robotized vocals and can be controlled by midi in real-time. The pitch/time spread features are great additions, and offer further possibilities for sonic exploration. Use them in tandem with the unison for fat, rich sounds that fill the stereo image. There are also dual high/low pass filters for further shaping and control.  

Film/game audio designers will want to pick this product up, as it is perfect for sound design for the human voice. With a few clicks, you can easily transform a voice into a completely new gender or species. This plugins powerful formant engine also makes it well suited to designing robotic and metallic creature sounds and will be an extremely useful tool for sound designers working on sci-fi projects. Go extreme for the full robotic/alien effect, or be sparring to add subtle enhancement and presence. We think some really cool things could be done when mild processing is used in combination with filters, futz fx. For example the sound of an astronaut's radio communications, or a hologram transmission, etc.

As well as for use in sound design, Pitch Monster is great for use in electronic music production, or any style that involves a lot of vocal tracks. This plugin would also be a good option for live performance, given its vocoder and real-time midi capability.

This plugin responds well to a range of different sound sources and is great for adding a sense of movement to static elements of your track. Use it to on a mono synth to make chords, create pitch movements in hi-hats, or automate the pitch spread to create intense build-ups.

We will use this plugin to design crazy robotic/alien voice effects and to mangle sounds into new and exciting variations.

The Bottom Line

Pitch Monster packs a large number of features for its price, and the quality of the pitch shifting is very impressive. The effects that can be produced are fantastic, and the GUI is very easy to work with making this product suitable for beginners and professionals alike. Devious machine really have unleashed a true monster with this plugin!

Get Pitch Monster Here  

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Since the early days of filmmaking, sound designers have searched for new ways to warp and transform the human voice. Think Darth Vader in Star Wars or the Daleks in Doctor Who. It has always been a challenge to give a voice to these not-quite-human characters, but luckily, now we are in an era where there are a wide range of tools to choose from. In this article, we go over our choices for the best voice manipulation plugins.

Tonsturm - FRQ Shift

First up we have FRQ Shift from German company Tonsturm. FRQ Shift is a pristine sounding, artefact free, dual-frequency shifter engine, offering everything from gentle modulation and stereo enhancement to more intense and alien effects. FRQ Shift not only sounds fantastic but offers a huge amount of flexibility and creative freedom when it comes to designing your own effects, thanks to the inclusion of modulation banks and its feedback matrix.

Devious Machines - Pitch Monster

‍We reviewed Pitch Monster a few months ago and it has quickly become a personal favourite of ours. The clarity of the pitch shifting, combined with its 3 separate engines makes this a powerful tool indeed. Pitch Monster is extremely versatile and can yield some incredible effects when pushed to its most extreme, or when used subtly. This product excels at creating heavily processed voice effects that still sound natural and smooth.

Krotos Audio - Dehumaniser 2

Dehumaniser is a modular, node-based voice processing tool that is especially suited to creature sound design. This product is amazingly simple to operate, even when using its more complex functions.  The extensive pre-set banks make find the right effect as easy as possible, especially useful for those who don't want to spend ages tweaking. Dehumaniser comes with 2 options: either run pre-recorded audio samples through it or use it as a live performance tool. In live-performance mode, Its effects are heard in real-time, allowing voice talent to instantly react to and be inspired by what they are hearing.

Waves - Morphoder

Waves' Morphoder may not be as recent as some of the other tools on this list, it still packs a mighty punch. Morphoder offers you the classic sound of the original Vocoder synthesizer with all the flexibility of a digital plugin. Whilst the vocoder effect may be most known for its use in dance music, it is also capable of some truly spine-tingling and horrifying voice effects.

With a ton of adjustable parameters and sonic possibilities, Morphoder gives you the freedom to create some really unique sounds and shape the voice with clarity and precision.

Zynaptiq - Morph 2.0

Morph 2.0 is a fun and easy to use tool for creating interesting soundscapes and crazy voice effects. This product allows real-time morph processing between 2 input signals, and offers the 5 different morphing algorithms to choose between, giving the user highly detailed control over the effects. Housed inside a deceptively simple GUI, this sophisticated tool will have you effortlessly creating out-of-this-world results from the most ordinary of input sources. Whilst Morph 2.0 can be quite taxing on your CPU, it more than makes up for it in the clarity of its sounds and its features.

We hope you find this article useful and have fun using these tools in your projects.

As an entry level Sound Designer it costs a lot of money to get your hands on the plugins that top sound designers use. However, Pro Tools offers a handful of unique plugins that are native and effective for high level sound design.

This article highlights five plugins that you can use to manipulate your sounds in unique ways. Not only will we state what plugins are great but what they are also great for designing.

1. Sci-Fi

Sci-Fi is an amazing modulation plugin that invites creative freedom in making out of this world sounds. With ring modulation you can add in-harmonic timbrel additions to the base of your sound to create a broken and jaded feel. Freak-mod is the more alien of the modes available adding a crazy random character to your sound design.

All of the effects have dynamic control with the envelope follow, LFO, sample & hold and the trigger & hold functions. This plugin is very useful for spaceship and alien world design.

2. AIR Multi-Chorus

AIR Multi-Chorus on the face of it, seems like a very basic chorus. This is until you use the voices knob where you can achieve really wide pitch digression either side of the original. With this you can achieve even thicker and wider choruses.

With the low cut and mix knobs, there is a lot of lenience of vocalisation integration with a lot of control. This plugin is great for inhuman and very large sci-fi vocals.

3. Lo-Fi

Lo-Fi is a bit reduction plugin that reduces the sample rate and sample size to introduce interesting artefacts to the original sound. Many people associate these sounds with robotic and electronic sound design elements, and it is so easy to input anything and make it sound robotic.

Additionally you can add noise, saturation and distortion to colour the sound differently. This plugin is most certainly most suitable for circuit, robot and electronic sound design.

4. Recti-Fi

Recti-Fi is an amazing and undermined harmonic plugin available to use amongst native Pro Tools. This plugin allows you to add or subtract harmonic content of the original sound to achieve an array of spectrally different sounds. For example, having a low filter in alternate mode gives a very 'thrust-like' sound whereas an all-pass in negative has an adverse effect.

When used in conjunction with with the original sound, the effected sound acts as so much weight sub-fundamental frequency. This plugin is more suited to messy sustained sounds rather than intricate, transient rich sources where this can be quite destructive.

5. Vari-fi

Vari-Fi is an amazing pitch shift plugin that hides away in Audio-Suite. This is because it requires and audio selection to render a new audio file and cannot do real-time slow down or speed up renderings. Vari-Fi allows whatever audio you have selected to be sped up or slowed sown within or beyond the edit-window selection.

Whereas the functions of this plugin stops here, it is beautifully effective at what it is does. This is useful on music for simulating a tape-stop or for a machine powering up or down.

"It's not the tools that you have faith in - tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work." -Steve Jobs

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Electromagnetic coil pickups provide users with the ability to capture the sound of electronic signals in everyday items. This can provide some quite unusual and fascinating results for Sound Designers.

Complex Simplicity

Coil pickups are magnetic transducers, that convert mechanical energy into electric signals. The user simply has to connect the pickup to an electronic device which they want to record. The resulting audio can then be transferred to a recording device via a standard jack cable.

As well as this technology being extremely accessible, it also rejects outside noise, provides unheard sounds, and can be especially interesting when the user changes the signal live (i.e with a phone). Opening apps, making selections and locking the phone all create interesting modulations. Take a listen to the following recordings we made:

https://soundcloud.com/344audio/sets/electric-coil-pickup-recordings

Budget Friendly

The great news for any cash strapped Soundies out there, is that this tool doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get your hands on. In regards to a price vs usage factor, we have to say that coil pickups are exceptionally valuable. JrF microphones offer these for as little as £15, which easily puts them into the 'must have' category.

They can be attached to items you already own, and used in the field on less conventional electronic devices. We recently recorded a failing lightbulb, then processed the signal to create an electronic Sci-Fi bullet for a challenging moment in a film.

Further experiments can lead to live performance, using the electronic signals as wavetable oscillators and creating bizarre abstract soundscapes.

We hope that you have considered getting hold of an Electric Coil Pickup, after hearing how this budget friendly tool can revolutionise your Sound Design.

Let us know what you think below.

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We were asked to visit a local college whose Music Technology students wanted to learn more about the world of Sound Design. Take a look at this video where we turned our Fireworks Recordings into Bomb Sounds and a Techno Track for them.

During the making of this video, we put together a FREE Sample Library utilising the sounds we've created.

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Get them here:​

https://www.facebook.com/344audio/posts/1919931411563780

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